1TB Drive for Dell Dimension 4550?

bevills1 · Member Joined: 25 Jan 2006 Location: United States

Does anybody make a 1TB IDE hard drive for the Dell Dimension 4550? Are there PCI SATA adapters available if 1TB IDE drives aren't made, and are there special drivers needed for the Dell Dimesnion 4550 for PCI SATA adapters? The largest IDE hard drive I found is 750GB Seagate from NewEgg, but customer reviews on it aren't good.

minidv2dvd · .com Joined: 12 Jul 2008 Location: United States

yes newegg has several sata to ide adaptors you could use. a better choice would be to add a sata card to the motherboard. again check newegg for sata card. make sure you get the proper mb interface. pci or pci-e.

redwudz · Mod Neophyte Joined: 07 Sep 2002 Location: AZ, USA

That PC apparently has four PCI slots, so unless all are occupied, you should have room for a PCI SATA adapter. The adapter should come with a driver disc. That should be all you need. You will need to partition and format the new drive after it's installed. W2000 would be able to do that, or software may be included with the drive. You will also need a Molex to SATA power adapter cable, which NewEgg should also have available. And probably a SATA data cable, unless one comes with the PCI adapter. Some SATA hard drives may also have those cables included, depending on the packaging. OEM drives are just the drives, with usually no software or accessories.

bevills1 · Member Joined: 25 Jan 2006 Location: United States

Is a Molex to SATA power adapter cable to adapt the ATA power cable to plug into the SATA drive? Does a SATA data cable perform same function as IDE cable for ATA drives?

TBoneit · Member Joined: 09 Feb 2003 Location: USA

Well a SATA data cable passes data in serial fashion, whereas IDE (PATA) passes the data in parallel. So same function in that they both move data totally different connectors and design.

Yes the Molex to SATA power is because most SATA drives only have SATA power connectors.

bevills1 · Member Joined: 25 Jan 2006 Location: United States

I decided to go with PCI SATA adapter at http://www.pcconnection.com/IPA/Shop/Product/Detail.htm?sku=5544402 with free shipping which has 2 SATA channels in case I want to add a second SATA drive. This site also had 1TB Seagate SATA drive for $140, and even after adding PCI SATA adapter plus SATA power cable and SATA signal cable, total is only $40 more than the 750GB IDE drive from NewEgg. I also gain SATA speed advantages plus now being upgraded to SATA use, and IDE will likely at some point become unavailable.

redwudz · Mod Neophyte Joined: 07 Sep 2002 Location: AZ, USA

Should work fine. Most cards use chips from major manufacturers, so only the card quality may sometimes be an issue. I prefer the Silicon Image chipsets, and avoid VIA and some others. Most all work well with HDDs. Optical SATA drives may be a issue with a few.

BTW, that's a SATA I card. Most drives are SATA II these days. But there is very little difference in the actual transfer speeds. And the drives are backward compatible with either specification. SATA I is 1.5GB/s and SATA II is 3.0GB/s. Of course, those are theoretical speeds.

Actual speeds depend on the drive itself and the controller. Either way, faster than a PATA HDD drive.

edDV · Posted: Sep 02, 2008 16:47

SATA card is nice and all but you won't see much speed advantage unless you are using this as a server. The only way you get >133MB/s bursts is from the disk cache. These drives can't sustain more than about 60MB/s off the heads. Raptors may make it to 90-120MB/s sustained.

The main advantage of SATA is external eSATA convenience + price/availability is now favoring SATA. I was hoping for a 133ATA (500GB,750GB,1TB) closeout sale but this hasn't happened.

I shop for capacity over speed. 133ATA is plenty fast for sustained transfer.
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bevills1 · Member Joined: 25 Jan 2006 Location: United States

In another forum someone said "Ick, SiL3112... have fun with your silent data corruptions" regarding this adapter. What is meant by that, and is this adapter a bad choice? Also I wonder whether I can install WinXP and boot to the SATA drive, and will SATA be added to BIOS after SATA adapter is installed; or do still have to boot to PATA drive and just use SATA drive for storage?

redwudz · Mod Neophyte Joined: 07 Sep 2002 Location: AZ, USA

Most times, you add a SATA boot driver when you install the OS to enable boot through a PCI SATA adapter. If I recall correctly, you can add the boot driver afterwards, though the process may be a bit more difficult. For non-boot operation, they are just 'Plug and Play' with no drivers needed for most OS's like XP or Vista. The card should come with a driver disc.

JMO, but I wouldn't use a ~1TB drive for boot as the boot drive is constantly accessed by the OS and this can slow large data or video transfers or captures. The other problem is defragging a very large drive takes a long, long time.

And the boot drive is likely to need defragging more often than other drives.

But you can make a 100GB or so partition for boot when installing the OS. But for transfer operations, the OS will still be accessing the drive, so you still have that problem with a separate boot partition on the same physical drive.

I'm not aware of any problems with SI SATA chipsets and 'data corruptions'.

More information would need to be provided.

I would prefer a SATA II, 3Gb/s PCI card as they have a newer chipset and most all SATA drives are now SATA II. There may also be a slight gain in performance over a SATA I card.

One nice option with a two port (Or More) SATA PCI card is you can use the second port with a eSATA PCI slot adapter and have eSATA available for add on external SATA drives.

The adapters are usually less than $10US. Or some SATA PCI cards have a external socket for eSATA.

adcvideo · Member Joined: 20 May 2004 Location: British Columbia

bevills1 · Member Joined: 25 Jan 2006 Location: United States

A slipstreamed WinXP with SP2 has already been made using nLite. Will there be any install problems with SP2?

Jim44 · Member Joined: 21 Feb 2004 Location: Pleasant Hill, CA

lordsmurf · Posted: Sep 04, 2008 15:29

I prefer to put my drives external these days. If nothing else, I can move from system to system with large data files, and avoid the network (or FTP).
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stiltman · Hi Ladies Joined: 10 Jul 2003 Location: Unleashed

bevills1 · Member Joined: 25 Jan 2006 Location: United States

Actually I think I'll need to either use a recovery disc or Ghost image of old drive to get all the drivers and BIOS onto the new drive since this is a Dell. I think I just need to format the new drive and make a Ghost image of the old drive to transfer everything to the new drive. This will be my first time replacing a drive in a Dell or other system with restore disk and would like to know if there's anything else I need to do with a new SATA drive.

TBoneit · Member Joined: 09 Feb 2003 Location: USA

There are no problems downloading all the drivers from Dell, you just need to go there and use the svc tag number off of the computer.

However, If you decide to image it then you should put in the controller card and load the drivers before you remove the old drive. I would also hook up the new drive and let windows load the drivers once it sees it as new hardware. The other problem I see is that as a Dell with no Sata ports you may not be able to set the new drive as the boot device in the bios. I've never tried that so I can't say either way.

BTW the Dell install disk is mainly a Standard windows OEM disc that installs on a Dell (Only!) and doesn't need activation. The drivers and applications still need to be loaded separately. The other option is if your Dell has a recovery partition? however then you are back to it won't boot the Sata drive until you figure out how to load the Sata card drivers into a non booting windows.

bevills1 · Member Joined: 25 Jan 2006 Location: United States

According to the 4/3/08 and 6/30/08 reviews for another PCI SATA adapter at http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductReview.aspx?Item=N82E16816132007 it has BIOS on the adapter card that allows it to boot systems that don't support SATA on the mobo, and I'd think other adapters would too. If not, then what's the purpose in getting SATA adapter from which system can't be booted.

Where is the svc tag number, and isn't the BIOS and drivers on another partition on the old Dell drive? Wouldn't the old drive need to be cloned and restored to the new drive in order to transfer that partition correctly?

lordsmurf · Posted: Sep 05, 2008 10:31

My Dell at work recently REFUSED to run a 1TB Seagate SATA 300 drive. I had to buy an external enclosure for it to be accessible. Not sure what the deal is, nor were the 1-2 other folks that looked into it.
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bevills1 · Member Joined: 25 Jan 2006 Location: United States

Did you install WinXP or clone the old drive to the new Seagate resulting in unbootable system, or was SATA drive not recognized when connected to the SATA adapter?

TBoneit · Member Joined: 09 Feb 2003 Location: USA

the svc tag is usually on the back on desktop models and on the bottom of laptops. On desktop models it is usually on a white tag that has barcodes on it and will not say svc tag.

bevills1 · Member Joined: 25 Jan 2006 Location: United States

It seems I was mistaken in assuming all SATA adapter cards have BIOS that can be flashed. I called CP Technologies about the card I got after failure to boot to SATA drive and was told it had no BIOS and wasn't able to be set to IDE mode. I called PC Connection about return, and they said I could just trash the card and would be given credit for purchase price which is great. Note the card could be used with SATA drive for extra storage but not as boot drive on this Dell PC. I wonder if this is the same problem lordsmurf had, i.e. his adapter either had no BIOS or he was unaware it need be set to IDE mode.

In post #19 at http://club.cdfreaks.com/f142/lg-ggw-h20l-stuck-pio-mode-4-sata-pci-card-239838/ I found link to a card used successfully by others to flash to base mode which enables IDE mode plus it has 4 internal SATA connections on the card compared to just 1 for the inadequate CP Techynologies card. Hope this info might be helpful to others with similar goals.

lordsmurf · Posted: Sep 09, 2008 13:52

bevills1 · Member Joined: 25 Jan 2006 Location: United States

There does seem to be some file corruption issues with Sil3112 chipset according to hits from http://www.google.se/search?hl=sv&q=SiL+3112+data+corruption& ... amp;meta=. However, the Sil3112 data corruption seems to occur when using RAID according to hits from Google search which is unimportant for my use because I don't plan to use RAID. Also the problem seems to be fixed by updating to Sil3114 drivers according to http://forums.nvidia.com/lofiversion/index.php?t12003.html, http://www.motherboardpoint.com/t7480-asus-a7n8x-sata-data-corrup ... -bsod.html et al. BTW the card link in my 9/9 post has Sil3114 chipset already.

bevills1 · Member Joined: 25 Jan 2006 Location: United States

I got the adapter from the link in my 9/9 post with SiI3114 dhipset and flashed base BIOS plus updated latest IDE driver, and it gets to screen showing the SATALink and BIOS version below which it shows "Press F1 to continue, or press F2 to run setup" on a Dell Dimension 4550 running WinXP SP2. I tried calling Silicon Image contact number who couldn't tell me whether there's a way to eliminate that message and have it boot without need to press F1. It boots normally after F1 is pressed but stays at that screen until F1 is pressed. Does anybody know how to bypass that message to allow boot without pressing F1, or is this something that's required for this Dell?