February 24, 2026
Dongle Wars: Retro Edition
ATAboy is a USB adapter for legacy CHS only style IDE (PATA) drives
Retro drive rescuer or $3 AliExpress déjà vu? Commenters roast
TLDR: ATAboy aims to connect very old hard drives to modern PCs over USB, but even the maker warns the AI-written firmware is buggy. Commenters say cheap adapters already solve this and the chip choice is wrong, framing ATAboy as cool nostalgia with questionable practicality for real data recovery.
Meet ATAboy: a DIY bridge that lets truly ancient IDE/PATA hard drives talk to modern computers over USB. No special drivers, a throwback “Award BIOS” setup screen, aimed at retro fans and data savers. The creator admits the AI‑assisted firmware is buggy, slow, and incomplete—use at your own risk. Cue the popcorn.
Top replies called it a reinvention of the wheel. burnt‑resistor dropped “Aand it’s vibe‑coded. Nope,” claiming there are “zillions” of working adapters already. eqvinox blasted the hardware pick, arguing the Raspberry Pi Pico lacks fast USB and better chips exist. hakfoo flexed receipts: those $3 AliExpress PATA‑to‑SATA widgets already handle the old geometry just fine, with successful dumps from 40MB and 200MB drives.
A few nostalgia junkies cheered the 1990s BIOS cosplay and liked the built‑in write‑protection talk, hoping for a safer archivist tool. But the meme of the day was “AI dev meets Indiana Jones hardware,” with jokes about a USB Ouija board for fossil drives. Verdict from most commenters: fun passion project, shaky first draft, and maybe not the hero we need when a cheap dongle does the job.
Key Points
- •ATAboy connects legacy CHS-only IDE (PATA) drives to modern computers as standard USB Mass Storage devices.
- •The firmware is a proof of concept, AI-assisted, buggy, incomplete, and may crash; use at your own risk.
- •No special drivers are required; Windows, Linux, and macOS are supported via a USB serial console UI.
- •Setup involves configuring drive geometry via an Award BIOS-inspired UI and optionally saving settings to EEPROM.
- •Write protection is enabled by default; the article advises imaging the entire disk (e.g., via dd) before disabling it.