Kitz Forum
Computers & Hardware => PC Hardware => Topic started by: geep on March 02, 2013, 11:48:47 AM
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Hi,
Anybody any experience of using cheap (or expensive) SATA to IDE adaptors?
I see lots on ebay around £2, whereas they are priced around £10 to £15 from the usual PC bits suppliers like CCL Online, ebuyer.
Need it to connect old IDE DVD to new all SATA mobo.
But think £10 for adaptor too dear, might as well buy new DVD drive for a smidge more.
Cheers,
Peter
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Geep
I used this one for transferring data when installing a new mobo in May last year. 2 in 1 IDE to SATA / SATA to IDE Converter Adapter WAY 40 PIN CONNECTOR CABLE ( 310382174627 ) It still seems to be available on ebay for about £3 or so inc postage.
Tony
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I got one on the old PC for connecting an old drive to SATA mobo. It was a few years ago now so I cant recall exact price, but Im pretty sure it was only a couple of quid.
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@Tony @kitz - thanks for that - nice to know these adapters can work.
I note there's a 160GB limit on the one Tony used - http://tinyurl.com/bflmvqt
Should be OK for DVD, but I also wanted to pull data off an old 250GB disk.
Must check carefully if others specify a disk size limit.
The one I was looking at looks similar http://tinyurl.com/bbqrqmx (at least in the 2nd picture) and says: Support IDE drive size larger than 240GB. How much larger, I wonder.
Cheers,
Peter
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Geep
I hadn't even realised there was a limit! I've just checked and the two IDE drives I transferred from were both 160GB so it does work up to its rated limit.
Tony
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You could just use a USB->IDE/SATA adaptor.
They cost anything from £10 upwards (seems to be plenty around the £15 mark) and shouldn't have any "limits" - I've used one with 2TB disks.
You'll probably find that long-term the USB adaptor is more useful.
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Need it to connect old IDE DVD to new all SATA mobo.
But think £10 for adaptor too dear, might as well buy new DVD drive for a smidge more.
Quite honestly, I would just buy an new DVD drive and connect it via the native interface rather than through a converter. :)
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The USB adaptor is an interesting proposition in its own right though. I can think of several times in recent years when I wanted to quickly check out a drive which I'd found in the back of a cupboard, and the USB adaptor provides a simple solution for that.
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Something that should also be pointed out when using the IDE/SATA converters. They can add quite a bit to the length of the existing drive... something to be considered if you are short on space in the case... as I later found out as it stopped the particular drive being racked in the bay where I wanted to originally put it.
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The USB kit is useful for restoring "headless" (ie no keyboard/mouse/monitor) stuff like Windows Home Server as it requires no drivers.
It's also useful for when you find an ancient disk - you'd be amazed the stuff you'll find on your old disks :)
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you'd be amazed the stuff you'll find on your old disks
Yes indeedy :)
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USB adaptor sounds interesting. Hadn't thought of that. New mobo should have USB3, so maybe quite speedy.
I need to get stuff off old PATA drives (not backed up, of course).
And Kitz's warning about size/length is noted.
At the moment am sidetracked - building a dummy load for the PSU. Am not 100% sure the PSU is good.
Noload reading for volts are sensible, but some just outside 10% limits. Will try it under a mimimumish load to make the switchmode electronics happy.
Cheers,
Peter
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...and finally...
1/ bought a new SATA DVD RW drive so I can ditch the PATA DVD
2/ bought a bidirectional IDE/SATA converter which claims to be good up to 1T @ £2.59 inc p&p to try to recover stuff from old 250G and 20G PATA disks. Very cheap and it doesn't need drivers.
3/ decided against USB/SATA as didn't want external connections
4/ thought about a PCI card with IDE socket (plus additional SATA sockets). All these cards use VIA VT6421A chipset. But decided against as it needs drivers, and driver support seems limited - seems no Win7, Win8 and doubtful about Linux
Have now noticed that the newly ordered mobo only has UEFI BIOS.
Suppose my existing Windows, Linux and legacy grub (on SATAs) will bork at that... ...will be an interesting learning experience...
Plus then trying to recover stuff from PATAs where some partitions seems to have vanished - even more interesting.
Cheers,
Peter
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Those VIA cards are very slow too. One alternative that costs about £5 (from China (http://item.taobao.com/item.htm?id=8120128993)) is the Promise TX2plus PCI card. It's a 3Gbps SATA card with a single PATA connector too. It's about two to three times as fast as the VIA cards. Maxtor do their own rebrand using the Promise controller.
(https://forum.kitz.co.uk/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fwww1.picturepush.com%2Fphoto%2Fa%2F12347664%2F480%2F12347664.jpg&hash=a4bbcb3a6d8c64cf5481b0fce2734672e3d2715b) (http://picturepush.com/public/12347664)
Good luck with whatever you're doing! ???
cheers, a
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One alternative that costs about £5 (from China (http://item.taobao.com/item.htm?id=8120128993)) is the Promise TX2plus PCI card. It's a 3Gbps SATA card with a single PATA connector too. It's about two to three times as fast as the VIA cards. Maxtor do their own rebrand using the Promise controller.
Curious question : At what point does ye Olde Fashioned PCI bus become a limiting factor here?
Looking at USB 3 cards, Gigabit Ethernet or 3Gbps SATA , won't they all exceed the bandwidth of PCI? Obviously, I'd hope they would work ok, but be limited in speed by the throughput of the PCI bus, not of their native medium.
I recently bought a Gigabit PCI-e ethernet card, imagining that putting it in a plain PCI slot would be a bottleneck. But now I've used my only PCI-e slot, and what if I want a USB 3 card too?
Am I just being daft, and PCI can handle it?
Ian
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Not sure SheddyIan,
It was planned to build a gigabit ethernet switch powered by a fanless 8 watt TDP AMD64 CPU. The mainboard, a Siemens D2703-A, a £20 board for industrial control applications has a single PCI slot but no PCIe. The project was abandoned as it wasn't clear that the solitary PCI bus (cascaded with risers) offers the required bandwidth to support the switching of ethernet frames from four ports at gigabit speeds. The project should be finished to prove one way or the other!
cheers, a
EDIT:
Here's the PCI SATA300 card fitted in the Siemens mainboard.
(https://forum.kitz.co.uk/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fwww5.picturepush.com%2Fphoto%2Fa%2F8664178%2F640%2Fd2703%2FDSC-0306b.jpg&hash=d14a2e04c763e636c95cf150a9c8534e18d2f4b8) (http://picturepush.com/public/8664178)
Here's the threadbare board. Note the plugged vias where the PATA connector should be!
(https://forum.kitz.co.uk/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fwww5.picturepush.com%2Fphoto%2Fa%2F8664158%2F640%2Fd2703%2FD2703-A23-2b.jpg&hash=89731fd90c5638cda5a7a260c67008fda7bfc5ca) (http://picturepush.com/public/8664158)
sorry, drifting off topic
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Yes, sorry for dragging this off topic.
Thanks for reply, Asbokid, that's very interesting. I wasn't aware of boards like that - might do a bit of googling later. I assume they can't run a normal OS though (Windows/Linux) without some fiddling?
Ian
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Seems like I got a happy ending. Assembled new mobo using old PSU - which seemed good according to volts reading using my loadtester. Installed Win7 on new 2TB drive.
Connected "broken" 250G PATA drive via the PATA/SATA adapter. Win 7 Partition Editor showed it as an empty drive. So did GPartEd from Parted Magic.
Before trying to restore the MBR I backed up the whole 250G twice (2 x 70 mins approx) using dd on commandline from Parted Magic LiveCD. Identical md5 sums (2 x 25 mins approx) - sounded promising.
When old PC had started misbehaving I had backed up the MBR and Partition table using dd - dd if=/dev/sda of=MBR.dump bs=512 count=1 as per http://www.unixmen.com/save-and-restore-mbr-in-linux/ (http://www.unixmen.com/save-and-restore-mbr-in-linux/)
So with fingers crossed I rewrote the MBR/Partition table from my saved file - and to my amazement it worked.
I can see all my FAT and reiserfs partitions and lots of files - which I suppose are all present.
From now on I'll always make sure that I've got a backup of the MBR/Partition tables.
And it seems my worries about UEFI were groundless, although maybe because I installed Win7 32bit on (only!) a 2TB disk, and not a bigger one.
The UEFI BIOS interface is all nice and graphical, and Win7 created an old style MBR disk, rather than a GPT disk.
The mobo was a bundle from Currys/PC World outlet on ebay - and am well impressed with what I got for £77.32 ASUS Intel Dualcore G620 Motherboard, Silver Plus Edition Bundle , to which I added a 2nd 2GB stick of RAM.
Cheers,
Peter
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That sounds like a fine job then. :clap2: