Anyone ever use an adaptor to make a PATA IDE HDD a SATA HDD?

[FulciLives]

Hello

Here is the story and I'll try to be brief but I want to make sure I give the details.

I have a computer with one HDD in it. The HDD is a SATA HDD. It is connected to a SATA connector on the motherboard. This is my main "C:" drive with the OS install etc.

Now I have an "old" PATA IDE HDD that I want to use but I don't have a PATA IDE connector free on the motherboard. This motherboard only has one PATA IDE connector on the motherboard and that PATA "cord" I guess you call it is hooked up to my DVD burner and my DVD-ROM drive.

I do have a 2nd unused SATA connector on the motherboard.

So I was thinking ... is there an adopter that will allow you to hook up the PATA IDE HDD to the SATA connector on the motherboard?

I figured different technology so there probably is no such adopter.

But I looked and I found one.

Here is the link so you know what I am talking about ---> CLICK HERE

So if I am looking at the adopter on the link and reading it correctly this will allow me to connect my PATA IDE HDD to the SATA connector on my motherboard.

Great news right?

Well ... I'm worried if this is really going to work well with the key word being well.

Any concerns I should have? I know the following came to me as possible concerns:

1.) Will the PATA IDE HDD be extra slow or something due to the adaptor?
2.) Will this affect the speed of the real SATA HDD connected to the computer?

Computer experts ... I need your help!

- John "FulciLives" Coleman

P.S.
I know I can buy a PCI PATA IDE CARD but that is something I would like to avoid as this computer only has 3 PCI CARD SLOTS and 2 are in use as it is and I want to use the 1 that is open now for something else I plan on getting in the future.

[chesterfield]

try this:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16822998001

i had a similiar porblem---just one ide connector, and i wanted four optical drives. had to ad two of these adapters plus a PCI-Express controller card because the unused sata ports did not recognize ATAPI--Optical drives....anyway, this piece will solve your problem...

[Heavensent]

pci to ide card should do the trick, if you have an empty pci slot.
and you can buy it with RAID if you need it.

[jagabo]

I use an adapter similar to the one chesterfield linked to. Works fine.

[FulciLives]

Well after reading the comments on the link provided by chesterfield I just decided to order a PCI PATA IDE card from newegg.com as a lot of those comments on the adaptor seemed negative.

Even though I only have one free PCI slot (which means this will fill all my PCI slots) I figured if I do need a free PCI slot I can use the one my modem is in as I never use my modem because I have cable internet.

Another thing is the PCI PATA IDE card allows for two devices and I have a 120GB HDD and another 80GB HDD so I figure maybe I can use both. Although come to think of it there is only room in my case for one more HDD ... hmmm ... I suppose I could remove my DVD-ROM (which I never use as I have a DVD burner) and put a HDD there although wouldn't I need "rails" to make it fit? Ahhhh the joys of owning a computer LOL

The real reason I went this way (the PCI PATA IDE card) is that I feel this is a safer solution.

This is what I ordered: CLICK HERE

It will be nice having some "breathing room" as my single 200GB SATA HDD is getting full.

- John "FulciLives" Coleman

[oldandinthe way]

You probably made the right choice. SATA drives maintain performance by adding cache memory to the drive. None of the SATA to IDE adaptors show any specs for memory performance is likely to be slow.

[chesterfield]

those two little boxes i ordered work wonders and does not take up any pci sloits---some reviewers don't know how to install and that is why newegg reviews are not accurate!!!

[FulciLives]

My number one choice would have been to just buy a 200GB or bigger SATA HDD but money is low at the moment and I really need more "breathing room" and since I already have a 120GB PATA HDD (as well as an 80GB PATA HDD) just laying around this seemed like the "low cost" solution ... for the moment.

- John "FulciLives" Coleman

[FulciLives]

those two little boxes i ordered work wonders and does not take up any pci sloits---some reviewers don't know how to install and that is why newegg reviews are not accurate!!!

Great make me second guess my choice LOL

I dunno ... I know there are a lot of morons out there ... but I did notice a lot of people saying that the things seem to fail after a few months. I read several reviews that mentioned that.

So I just feel safer doing what I did but hey ... thanks for the help anyways.

I do appreciate it

- John "FulciLives" Coleman

P.S.
How long have you had your adaptors working now?

[chesterfield]

they computer runs 24/7 and i bought them a year ago.......

[FulciLives]

they computer runs 24/7 and i bought them a year ago.......

LOL ... it figures.

I should have waited for more comments I guess before I decided to order what I did.

- John "FulciLives" Coleman

[SingSing]

The SATA to PATA adapter power supply connector looks different from the PATA power connector. Does user need a power supply adapter cable ?

[FulciLives]

The SATA to PATA adapter power supply connector looks different from the PATA power connector. Does user need a power supply adapter cable ?

From what I read the device that chesterfield linked too requires power and uses the same kind of power connector that a floppy drive would use.

- John "FulciLives" Coleman

[chesterfield]

yeah, they use floppy drive power connectors, had them working on both hard drives and optical drives......

[chesterfield]

they computer runs 24/7 and i bought them a year ago.......

LOL ... it figures.

I should have waited for more comments I guess before I decided to order what I did.

- John "FulciLives" Coleman

if you just ordered from newegg, you can cancel for another hour or so.....

[FulciLives]

I still feel better with the PCI PATA IDE card LOL

- John "FulciLives" Coleman

[oldandinthe way]

FulciLives

Hold your ground. Using an IDE (parallel drive) on an SATA interface is like taking an eight lane freeway and merging all of the traffic into a single lane. That is why there is memory on SATA drives to allow the transfer to continue during the time between sectors.

I'd guess performance would be similar to external USB drives. (I put all my old IDE drives in USB boxes - although they are slow they are faster than backing up to DVD).

[Bjs]

You would be better off with getting the adapter and not the pci card ... as it dosent consume mother board resources .

After saying this a number of times and users still go ahead ... I'll repeat this once more .

1: The sata adapter will not interfere with the drive speed's , except where transfer of data "between" the sata and ide units are concerned ... in this mode the transfer of data will move at the lower speed of the two drive's .

2: Adding pci cards require the pairing of slots on mother board .

Onboard agp# + agp slot# + pci1 (share resources , only 1 may be used) , # denotes (may not have been included)
Pci2 + pci3 (share resources , only 1 may be used)
Pci4 + pci5 (share resources , only 1 may be used)

In the case of a pci slot only unit (old mother boards) , pair them off .

Filling all slots on motherboard can , and will bring conflicts ... and may damage the motherboard .

[jagabo]

Using an IDE (parallel drive) on an SATA interface is like taking an eight lane freeway and merging all of the traffic into a single lane.

Yes. And that single lane run more than 8 times faster than the eight put together. Of course with a PATA/SATA adapter you are going through a layer of translation so there is a little loss of throughput. And in any case, the limitting factor is how fast the drive can read data off the platters, not the I/O interface.

That is why there is memory on SATA drives to allow the transfer to continue during the time between sectors.

There is just as much memory on PATA drives.

I'd guess performance would be similar to external USB drives.

You'd guess wrong.

[oldandinthe way]

SATA drives do not have a fast enough clock rate to make up for the loss of width. The transfer rate figures depend on the continuous traffic which caching makes possible.

Memory on IDE drives does not improve the performance in this conversion situation. If we use a funnel as an analogy, SATA cache would be within the funnel, where IDE memory would be outside the wide end.

[SingSing]

SATA is using QPSK, so it will send more than one bit per clock.

[dun4cheap]

I use this one here, and I have not had any problems

http://www.geeks.com/details.asp?invtid=SIL3611&cpc=SCH

[chesterfield]

i use the same one as the post above. just last night i encoded a 1 hour mpeg captured from my PVR-150 that is connected to a digital box. the burner i used is the new samsung 18X, total encode and burn time was 9 minutes, 5 seconds---these adapters have little to no effect on data transfer......

[falberni]

I have one of these IDE raid cards. It's based on the Silicon Image 688 chipset. It works great. But here are some issues that need to be thought out.

1. If the main HD is on the motherboard's SATA, and the second HD is on the IDE card, you can see the disk activity LED for one of the HDs only. It depends on where you plug in your LDE connector. You can connect it to the mobo, or to the card.

2. These types of cards are recognized as SCSI devices by the system. I have problems using some very useful hardware monitoring utilities. One such utility is SpeedFAn. It measures the CPU and HD temperature. But when I run it with this card installed, SpeedFan freezes the system during hardware detection. Another such useful utility is HWINFO32. It is most useful for checking memory speed and some other hardware info. It too hangs when this IDE card is installed.

3. Most IDE cards do not have support for optical drives.

Myself I have the new ASRock 775Dual-VSTA mother board with E6400 CPU. The mobo has two IDE connectors. I have three DVD-RWs installed on the mobo's IDE connectors. No HD is installed on the mobo. I also have three HDs They are all IDE. I have connected them all to the IDE card. The system boots from one of the HDs on the IDE card. The LED is hooked up to the IDE card.

[chesterfield]

this is the reason i went with the adapter and sata pci express controller card....my current mobo, and many others will only recognoze two optical devices on IDE Channel 1. my mobo has two more IDE Channels but niether of them will recognize an atapi, OPTICAL, device. first i bought just the little adapter that plugs into the back of the DVD drive to convert to SATA, well, guess what, the mobo wouldn't recognize the DVD drives that were converted from IDE to SATA. i bought the pci express sata card and the drives work awesome....

[SingSing]

Dose this implied the driver of the sata for the mobo is not compatible with the adapter ?

[chesterfield]

no, the mobo will work with the adapter with HARD DRIVES, not optical drives...

[SingSing]

Since it only does HD and not optical drive, does it implied the driver is incompleted ?

Whose chip set was on the PCI SATA board ?