Sorry for the long delay..

Sorry for not giving you an update earlier. I've been very busy, and sorry to say not that busy with this project. In the meantime I've married, sold my wife's house and moved to a different city. And last but not least the 4th of July (honestly) my wife is expecting a baby. How many changes can one handle?

Ok, enough of my personal life, so how's the project coming along? I've shifted from opinion again and have gone back to my first idea which was to build a simple 40/60 pin converter. A brand new PCM/PATA design turned out to be too costly for the amount of PCB's I need to get build.. It turns out there are good IDE/SATA converters available that I'm currently testing:

This gives me way more options in existing HDD enclosures that I can think of. I was also wrong about the JMICRON JM20337. The bug did exist in the reference design of the earlier enclosures that were produced. The enclosures that are available nowadays do not longer have that bug as they've removed a resistor from the reference design. I still haven't decided on the IDE/USB or IDE/SATA/USB combination but it has to perform well and be of good quality. But now I can add SATA enclosures to my list of options, which is great.

So I've decided to go back to my first idea which was easy and quick to build. And today I received my first revision of the prototype I've put together:

The soldering on these prototypes will be done by a friend of mine. He has the skill to solder that small 0.5mm pitch connector by hand. More later..