Why using 3,5" IDE units? With your Falcon inside a big tower case you might be interested in using cheap IDE units such as harddrives or/and CD-ROM readers. This however means that we need to find a way to connect 3,5" IDE hardware to the 2,5" connector on the Falcon motherboard. In my opinion the best solution is to get hold of an adapter instead of using cable converters. I tried the latter with very, very bad results. The first cable I got did not work at all, while the replacement I was sent later on showed to be very unreliable. What do I need? The adapter itself is originally aimed at allowing 2,5" units to be used on a system with only 3,5" connectors, but nothing says it can't be used the other way around! To the right you can see a picture of such an adapter.

How do I attach it?
There are 2 things you may want to do before getting started:

• Remove the power connector! This is *only* used to feed power to 2,5" units so we will not be needing this!
• Depending on how much space is needed to fit the adapter on board, you may have to adjust the placement of the capacitor near the IDE connector on the Falcon board. I solved it by simply losening one end of the capacitor and made it standing up inside of lying down.

IMPORTANT: Some users with CT60's and accelerated bus/board have reported problems with using long IDE cables, so keep an eye on that. I have also noted that my setup will NOT function reliably when I have more than 1 IDE unit attached! I was experiencing a lot of data corruption when reading/writing to and from the harddisk. Due to this, I am looking into purchasing a SCSI-2-IDE adapter to be able to use a standard IDE CD-ROM with my Falcon.