The mod is based on earlier work, which consisted of manually soldering the 44 lines of an IDE cable on to the main Dreamcast motherboard. This allowed an IDE hard drive to be neatly mounted ...
In a PC, a 34-wire ribbon connects the floppy drive (if present) to the motherboard. A 40-wire cable connects the IDE (ATA) CD drive, and an 80-wire cable is used for the IDE (ATA) hard disks.