Any Advice Pertaining to SATA/IDE Adapters?

[know of fence]

I'd like to make a modern HDD/SSD temporarily work in an old (Pentium IV era, year ~2003) workstation PC, is there something I should look out for using SATA to IDE adapters?

There are HDD-SATA to IDE and HDD-IDE to SATA, as well as bi-directional varieties, which all seem to require an additional power cord.

Would I be better off buying a SATA conroller PCI-card?

As an aside: Is it possible to use a USB-drive as a primary drive (for c:/windows) in a system?

SATA-To-IDE-IDE-to-SATA-Converter

 

[corkyg]

The problem is not SATA. It is easy to insert a PCI SATA board. The problem is that on mobos such as my P4PE, there is no AHCI option in BIOS, and without that, using a SSD in such a machine is a waste of money. Anyway, avoid adapters!

 

[Elixer]

I have yet to see a good adapter that will work 100% of the time.
Seems they all have issues.
PCI cards are better, at least most of them.

 

[Coup27]

Do you really have to do this? You may spend more time dealing with adapter issues than you would have done waiting for the IDE HDD. These things don't have a great record.

 

[bradley]

You can find these adapters on Ebay shipped from China for $2.50. I used a generic red (not black) PCB adapter to transfer proprietary data from an older IDE CD burner and it worked fine. It couldn't hurt to try before going to a more expensive solution.

 

[groberts101]

I use that cheap $5 bridge for SSD on my kids P4 system. Woks well and regardless of the whopping 26MB/s ceiling?.. it's damned fast compared to HDD.

So, while I would agree that a PCI card may be faster.. it's hardly going to make much difference in anything other than sequential transfers from disk to disk.

Once you get the low latency of SSD hooked up by any means possible.. the bulk of the gain has been made already.

 

[corkyg]

I assume by the lack of comment means that AHCI is not necessary to run a SSD?

 

[groberts101]

I assume by the lack of comment means that AHCI is not necessary to run a SSD?

"optimal"?.. yes.

"necessary".. no.

For such an old system there would be so many other bottlenecks anyways, it would be a moot point from an overall performance perspective, IMO.

Any way that the OP can get an SSD installed will make it faster than it ever was new.

 

[corkyg]

Thanks! That is useful info.

 

[kbp]

I have a HP laptop (dv2000 series) that has a Vertex 3 in it. I have no option for AHCI so it runs in ATA mode. Still much better than the old spinner.
But, I do not think TRIM will work in IDE mode.....So idle time a few times a week

 

[PandaBear]

I'm currently using 2 bi-directional one in my Phenom II with 2 PATA drives. So far they work as expected with no problem at all.

 

[corkyg]

IDE mode? Shouldn't that be ATA or Ultra ATA mode?