SATA to PATA converters

[whattaguy]

I am running 4 HDD's and 2 optical drives.

All 4 HDD's are running off my 2 IDE channels (slave and master), and the 2 optical drives are running off my IDE controller card (both master). I have 4 round IDE cables in my system which makes it pretty difficult to work in my sytem.

Would something like these work? Any performance issues?

http://www.newegg.com/app/View...=12-107-112&depa=1

http://www.newegg.com/app/View...=22-999-111&depa=1

I would like to take the contoller card out of the equation, and I have 4(?) SATA channels on my mobo (DFI Lan Party UT NF3).

 

[phisrow]

In principal you should be fine. A lot of real "SATA" drives, especially early ones(and a number of modern ones as well), are just PATA drives with bridge chips on their controller boards. As for performance, for pretty much anything but accessing the cache PATA bandwidth is just fine. SATA has a slightly higher theoretical throughput; but when the drive's moving parts are the bottleneck(and they certainly are, unless you are running some sort of fibre channel monster that probably costs more than your entire computer) it doesn't much matter.
As for these specific adapters, though, I've no idea. They could Just Work without any trouble for years on end, long after the drives attached have died. Or they could decide to cause subtle data corruption and crash your system ten times a day. Odds are that you will be just fine; but I would buy one the one with the actual user feedback, myself.

 

[whattaguy]

So what would be the recommended way to set this up? I was thinking of putting my 2 larger and faster drives (OS and file drive) on the SATA controllers, my 2 backup drives on IDE 1(master and slave?), and my optical drives on IDE2 (master and slave?), and get rid of my controller card. Will this work?

Will everything boot up fine if I just put the OS drive on SATA, or do I need to reformat?

Thanks.

 

[WebDude]

I've used the Abit Serillel2 pata to sata convertors. http://www.abit-usa.com/technology/serillel_new.php They've work flawlessly for me. They also allow you to convert pata optical drives to sata, provided your sata controller supports atapi optical drives.

You shouldn't have to reformat your drives. In my experience, switching from pata to sata and back again required no reformatting.