SATA With Adaptor

[McCormack]

I've got an older IDE box that is plenty fast for what I do (internet; light gaming; image processing), but IDE hard drives are becoming hard to come by so I'm considering running a SATA hard drive with an IDE to SATA adapter, and my question is, will a SATA/adapter drive combination run as fast as a straight IDE drive in my computer?

 

[jaqie]

depends on what path you take, but mostly yes. SATA II and higher has something called NCQ in it, which helps a whole lot with speed and responsiveness of the hard drive when more than one thing wants data at once so you are better off getting a sata 2 card or newer.

 

[McCormack]

Would something like this http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16812206002 be sufficient, or would it be a bottleneck to good performance?

 

[Fardringle]

Would something like this http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16812206002 be sufficient, or would it be a bottleneck to good performance?

That lets you connect IDE drives to SATA controllers. You need a SATA controller card.

 

[McCormack]

Whoops, I got my adapter types mixed up. I think this http://www.amazon.com/StarTech-com-I...e+sata+adapter is the type that converts a SATA hard drive to run in an IDE system. I'll give it a try and see what happens.

 

[Fardringle]

That is an option but I haven't had much luck with direct IDE to SATA adapters. I would use something like this:
http://www.amazon.com/StarTech-PEXES...a+adapter+card

Or this one if you need regular PCI instead of PCI Express:
http://www.amazon.com/StarTech-com-P...a+adapter+card

 

[McCormack]

Thanks for the links. I don't know anything about RAID, so will the Startech PCI RAID card allow me to use a single SATA hard drive in my system? Or how about a two drive system using an SSD for my operating system along with a SATA mechanical drive as my data drive? (I've already got an SSD HD that I bought for a now defunct SATA computer, so I might as well put it to use in my IDE machine.)

 

[jaqie]

The answer is yes. raid just means software raid capable, dont use those for raid, ever, they are junk for that.

 

[McCormack]

Sounds good... it's nice to know I've got some options to keep my old box going for awhile. Thanks much for the help.

 

[jaqie]

Im all for older boxes if they do the job - look in my sig for my 386... and I just got an IBM x41 tablet PC for $20 (1.5ghz single core) which suits my needs far better than the newer laptop it's replacing, I am putting an mSATA SSD into it soon, as well. You aren't alone in liking and using old hardware with a few new parts!

Posted from my x41, still with the 60gb hdd, freshly installed xmint.

 

[Bubbaleone]

I have an old (2001) Dell 400SC file server that's setup with a SYBA SY-PCI40010 running two Hitachi 500 GB drives in a non-raid configuration, with Windows 7 x86 installed on a seperate partition. For my old 400sc I consider the price vs performance trade-off well worth it.

As jaqie and Fardringle have already noted; a PCI/SATA II add-in card is the way to go and I definitely agree. If you plan to install the OS on a SATA II or (backward compatible) SATA III HDD that will boot from the PCI/SATA II add-in card, be sure to note these considerations: When the computer BIOS can't find any bootable IDE drives, it must be capable of detecting bootable add-in cards.

For this to work, the PCI/SATA add-in card must have its own BIOS (which the PCI/SATA/RAID add-in cards do have) and the computer BIOS must be enabled in order to recognize the card. PC BIOS options to enable this will differ, but look for something like "Boot from add-in card" or "Boot from SCSI" and enable it.

 

[McCormack]

My ASUS A7N8X motherboard had been slowly dying and I was all set to spend some cash and build an up-to-date machine, but then I remembered that I had an old A-Open AK77-8XN board in mothballs, so I threw that in and did a fresh XP install and I'll be darned if the A-Open board didn't work even better than the ASUS board did. I love it when that happens. Now I'm doing a few updates like the SATA stuff and a new graphics card, and I should be good to go for another ten years, lol.

So anyway thanks for the suggestions, especially about the boot up process with an add-in card. I'll have to do some sleuthing in my A-Open's BIOS to make sure that it's capable of booting off a SATA card.

 

[Matt1970]

This has just as good of reviews as anything anyone has listed and is less than 1/2 the price and even cheaper than your IDE to Sata adaptor.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16815124006

 

[jaqie]

I have personally owned several of those cards, and suffice it to say if it works out of the box consider yourself lucky and sacrifice some banannas to the gods for your fortune.

Syba's cards are that unreliable and poor.

 

[Matt1970]

I would have not hesitation buying something that has 4 out of 5 eggs for a review.

 

[McCormack]

Thanks for the link Matt.

Thanks for the advice on the Syba cards jaqie, and I know you meant it as a joke but there is only one true God and if we're going to be sacrificing bananas as a form of thanks, Jehovah is the one we need to be sacrificing them to. ()

 

[bryanl]

Would something like this http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16812206002 be sufficient, or would it be a bottleneck to good performance?

It won't bottleneck the drive since SATA is a faster interface, but a better converter is this one:

http://www.meritline.com/ide-to-sata-or-sata-to-ide-adapter---p-36542.aspx

It's not only cheaper but can be used with either SATA or IDE drives (and either SATA or IDE controllers) and is compatible with all drives. However it is confusingly labeled and is easy to insert incorrectly into IDE connections.

PCI SATA controllers based on a Silicon Image controller chips are another alternative that work well, also with all drives. Another popular controller, based on a VIA chip, appears to have problems booting with DVD & CD drives.