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SATA to IDE solutions?

F

FreakyT

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Joined
Jun 20, 2004
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46
I was looking into upgrading my older micro-atx desktop on the cheap, and it looks like the AMD Fusion A8 processor would give me a nice dollars to performance ratio.

Every socket FM1 motherboard I can find, though, only provides SATA connections, and I don't want to just get rid of my old IDE drives. After doing some searching, I found that there are "SATA to IDE" adapters, as well as PCI add on cards that give you IDE ports. However, the reviews on the add-in cards seemed to be mixed at best, and I couldn't find much concrete information on the adapters.

My question is: what is the best way to connect IDE drives to a newer motherboard that only provides SATA connections? Does anyone have any experience with a similar situation?

Thanks!
 
The adapters usually work fine. The original SATA raptors were actually just PATA IDE drives with serial bridges slapped on them.

Careful with IDE cards. Not all of them are bootable and those that are sometimes just don't play nice with motherboard BIOS.
 
I'd say switch drives man... IDE drives are old, ALL of them are super slow these days, and they'll probably start dying off any time now because IDE drives are old. If you insist, then I'd use a SATA-IDE adapter like linked above, but I don't trust Syba at all so I wouldn't buy that particular one. I haven't used an IDE drive in my computer for >5 years. I do have a 500GB PATA drive in my Playstation 2, but if I were to redo that, I'd get an adapter to let me run a 2.5" SATA drive in it.
 
Thanks -- it sounds like the adapter is the way to go! I'm focusing on keeping the drives because this is an exercise in seeing how few components I could get away with upgrading (I was thinking only Mobo+CPU+RAM).

dandragonrage said:
I don't trust Syba at all so I wouldn't buy that particular one
Click to expand...

The Newegg reviews seem do seem pretty questionable -- are you familiar with any better adapters?
 
The Rosewill RC-204 is good [link]. It uses the Silicon Image SiI3811 bridge chip, which is the best.

I'm using two of these, in separate PCs, but not for permanent IDE drives. They're each on a IDE mobile rack, and, with a little re-wiring of the rack, it permits real hot-swap of IDE drives (remember, the OS thinks it's a SATA drive). This is the only bridge solution I found that does support hot-swap.

Regardless, I agree with others; you should just scrounge a ~250GB SATA drive. Find another outlet for being stubborn :) :).
 
There is absolutely nothing wrong with PCI add-on cards, many of us 'old dogs' have been using them in some form or another for years.

Find a cheap Promise Ultra100 or Ultra133 card - that will give you two IDE channels for up to four PATA devices. You should be able to find one on Ebay for pretty cheap and they are good, solid, tried and true hardware.

I haven't seen a motherboard yet that couldn't boot from a Promise card when the BIOS is properly configured.

There is no reason to throw out perfectly good hardware when it suits you fine and can be put to good use.
 
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