Customer Reviews

SATA to PATA/IDE Hard Drive Interface Adapter

5 star:		(81)
4 star:		(24)
3 star:		(16)
2 star:		(9)
1 star:		(29)

 

 

I have an old PC (Approximately 7 years old). I wanted to upgrade to an SATA drive, but this old PC did not have the ability to accept SATA drives. I purchased another type of adapter. It was the "Ide To Sata Drive Motherboard by StarTech". That adapter was supposed to convert the EIDE bus on the motherboard to SATA but the system could not recognize the drive.

I was pleasantly surprised when I received this "SATA to PATA/IDE Hard Drive Interface Adapter" when I attached it to the SATA drive, plugged the ribbon cable into it, and the PC recognized the drive and I was up and running.

The description is misleading and I don't want to be a "JERK" either. However, but by looking at the photograph of this item, you can plainly tell that it will not convert in reverse, as the other reviewer states.

I would recommend this adapter.

This is a duel review for two products that I bought with the idea that they would be used together and they did this well. The products are the Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 1.5 Terabyte (1.5TB) SATA/300 7200RPM 32MB Hard Drive and the SATA to PATA/IDE Hard Drive Interface Adapter. I hope this will help somebody who has the same problem that I had. I have a Dell Precision WorkStation 350 computer that had a 40GB IDE hard drive. I wanted to upgrade to a larger drive and settled on the 1.5 TB Seagate Barracuda 7200.11, which is SATA II. My old computer does not have a SATA connection so I bought the PATA to SATA adapter with the idea that I would plug the adapter into the hard drive and attach it to my external IDE hard drive case (cage) then plug it into the USB port. I had to leave the Seagate drive outside the case and only attach the electrical connections since the adapter is too large to fit into the cage with the hard drive, as expected. I then used the windows Computer Manager (right click My Computer to open then click disk mangement under storage) to initialize the drive and format it. After this, the computer recognized the drive when I opened My Computer. I used the Seagate Disk Wizard to clone my old IDE hard drive onto the new SATA II drive. This worked great. I then checked the Seagate drive and all my data, including the operating system (XP Service Pack 3), was on the Seagate. So far so good. I then turned off the computer and swapped hard drives. That is I removed the old IDE drive completely and replaced it with the Seagate SATA II and adapter. I then reassembled my computer, crossed my fingers and turned it on. To my suprise and delight, the computer came on and the operating system started up and ran flawlessly with the Seagate SATA II drive running Windows XP Sevice pack 3 and the computer recognized the drive as having 1.5 TB. After several hours, I shut down the computer and tried to restart it and this is where things went bad. The BIOS started then I got the error message "\windows\system32\config\system file missing or corrupt". I could get no further than this error message no mater what I tried. I finally decided to start over, put the drives back into the original positions and reclone the old drive back onto the new drive. I swapped the drives after the procedure and again the computer worked perfectly with the cloned data on the Seagate that was now running in my old computer. Then I shut the computer off and tried to restart it and got the same error message "\windows\system32\config\system file missing or corrupt" again.

The fix. After many hours of research and trying to fix the problem it came down to one simple thing. The old computer of course had an old BIOS, which limited the hard drive capacity to 137GB so even though the old BIOS recognized the SATA II hard drive, it could not use it after a shut down. My old BIOS was version AO1 and after an up grade to version AO2, the computer recognized the new Seagate SATA II drive perfectly, even after many shut down/restart cycles.

Even though I had some problems with the installation (not the fault of either product), I give both products top ratings since they both work well together. The only draw backs are that the PATA to SATA adapter is somewhat bulky and the connection to the drive is not very tight although it is an adequate fit. I have had no problems with the Seagate Drive.

As others have stated this is a bit on the bulky side. It is designed to go behind a 3.5" drive. I personally used this behind a 2.5" drive I pulled out of a broken laptop. Because of its size I currently can only use one 2.5" drive in the bay.

Aside from the size issue. The adapter works just fine with an inconvient quirk. It does need to be on position 0 of the IDE cable, which will make it impossible to hook up as a slave to your boot drive.

Overall I give it 3 stars. It works as stated, just bulky and needs to be on position 0.

I dont know how the people could think that this could go from IDE to SATA when it clearly states SATA to IDE.

Pros:
Simple to put in, no extra wires

Cons:
Bulky (not suitable for 2.5" drives)
Must be on position 0 (cant use on slave drive behind Master Boot Drive)

This product worked easily and with no bugs or real problems. I used it to install a new SATA drive (as the master -- haven't tested this on a secondary drive) in an old computer. After hooking it up and powering on, the BIOS recognized the new drive right away.

My only complaint is that this is a bulky adapter that's designed to mount directly to the drive. My case has a weird arrangement for the hard drive enclosure, and this adapter made it impossible to put my drive back where it should go! I ended up jury-rigging the drive enclosure to move it to a new mounting point. (And as the product info says, don't even *think* about trying to fit this into an external drive case!)

Great product, but be aware that it plugs directly into the SATA ports on your hard drive and is a bit bulky -- if you've got a compact case where everything is crammed together, that could be an issue.

I was going to upgrade my old motherboard so I could use the new larger SATA drives. I have an old 2002 computer with a 120GB 7200 rpm WD PATA drive that runs fine. I just brought this adapter and a Western Digital 1 TB Caviar Green SATA Intellipower 32 MB Cache Bulk/OEM Desktop Hard Drive WD10EADS [Amazon Frustration-Free Packaging](now obsolete after buying it 2 weeks ago) instead. The EADS drive turned out to be good for XP users because WD uses a new "Advance Format" for the new drives and XP users with 2 partitions need to run a WD Align program.

The only issue I had was the adapter's power socket is a little tight making it difficult to plug in the power connector while holding the fragile adapter PCB. Otherwise it works great.

Notes:
1) Western Digital offers free imaging software to clone the old drive onto a new WD drive. Their Acronis True Image WD Edition copied my C: and D: partitions in the same proportions onto my new drive. Seagate offers similar S/W for their drives.

2) When cloning, I had to put the new drive on the Secondary Master (middle connector on 40-pin IDE cable) because the adapter works only as a Master, as mentioned by a previous reviewer. The newly cloned drive then goes on the end connector of the 80-pin EIDE cable on the Primary Master.

3) While doing this upgrade, the IDE controller went into PIO mode instead of Ultra DMA Mode which made the system run really slow. I found out my old device on the Primary Slave connector was causing CRC errors which forced the Master into PIO mode. I remove the Slave device and rebooted allowing XP to reset the DMA mode. The new 1TB drive is now running in Ultra Mode 6.

Before installing SATA Serial ATA Hard Drive/CD/DVD-ROM to PATA/IDE Interface Convert Adapter please view the video at www.hpodd..com/tips.

Note:You can only use this product on the primary end of your data cable. You
must disconnect the slave end. That means you can only use one drive on the
cable. If you must have two drives on the data cable this will not work for
you. It caused my system to crash and it relabeled all my drives except for
the C drive. Watch VIDEO it will explain this.

NOTE: This VIDEO LINK should be included with the purchase of product.

Thanks Jim

With IDE hard drives getting more difficult to find I thought of trying a Seagate 320 GB SATA drive but without a controller card. There's no cheaper way (Mac compatible PCI controller cards cost as much, if not more than SATA drives) to use newer higher capacity drives. At first I was hesitant because of my experience with Mac Quicksilver's motherboard recognizing HDs to 128 GB. With the Mirror Drive the 320 SATA drive was recognized to full capacity instantly. I use the new drive as backup together with an older 160 GB IDE drive as the main drive. The adapter lengthens the dimensions of the SATA drive so I placed it into one of spare drive bays beneath the DVD burner, using the other controller. Other Mac upgraders told me OS X 10.4/5 will not recognize onboard Western Digital HDs so I have no experience with them except as external USB drives.

I tried 2 of them on 2 different PCs with 2 different high capacity drives. The results are the same:

1) competing IDE to SATA converter gives good speed:
magic:~# hdparm -t /dev/hdb

/dev/hdb:
Timing buffered disk reads: 118 MB in 3.04 seconds = 38.78 MB/sec

2) This converter gives very slow speeds in PIO 5 mode:
magic:~# hdparm -p 5 /dev/hdc

/dev/hdc:
attempting to set PIO mode to 5
magic:~# hdparm -t /dev/hdc

/dev/hdc:
Timing buffered disk reads: 8 MB in 3.32 seconds = 2.41 MB/sec

3) When I enable DMA, it's slightly faster
magic:~# hdparm -d 1 /dev/hdc

/dev/hdc:
setting using_dma to 1 (on)
using_dma = 1 (on)
magic:~# hdparm -t /dev/hdc

/dev/hdc:
Timing buffered disk reads: 44 MB in 3.04 seconds = 14.46 MB/sec

But DMA mode, as slow as it is, is also unstable on both my machines and I have to turn it off:
kernel: hdc: dma_timer_expiry: dma status == 0x21
kernel: hdc: DMA timeout error
kernel: hdc: dma timeout error: status=0xd0 { Busy }
kernel: ide: failed opcode was: unknown
kernel: hdc: DMA disabled
kernel: ide1: reset: success

I get the same exact errors with 2 of those adapters on 2 different PCs, so it's not a one off
problem, a bad machine, or a bad cable.

The adapter worked with my SATA 2.5" hard drive that i wanted to connect to my old Dell desktop (which has an IDE interface). But there are some limitations as follows:
1) It appears that this adapter cannot be used to connect as a slave. Following the instructions to remove the pin on the adapter to set it as slave, my primary drive failed to boot with the adapter and SATA hard drive attached as slave.
2) The SATA hard drive and adapter must be connected (as master) to the first connector on the IDE cable with no other drives attached. My computer did not boot when I added another IDE slave hard drive on the same cable.
3) Also, the SATA hard drive's data transfer rate dropped when attached to this adapter on the IDE interface. Average data transfer rate was lower than when connected to an actual SATA connection. I was able to get an average of 30MB/s using this adapter with a 2.5", 7200 rpm SATA hard drive. (Tested using HDtune diagnostic software).

Conclusion:
If you plan on using only one SATA hard drive as master on an old Dell desktop computer, then this adapter should work.

This adapter enabled me to install a 1TB Seagate Barracuda SATA Drive in my MDD G4 Mac. A rubber band should come with it to aid in installation. The SATA connection is very loose. I started by connecting to the rear ATA 100 bus and copying everything off the 4 100 GB drive in the Mac, that way I could swap the drives in the front ATA 66 bus. Once completed I put the drive in the drive carrier and snapped into place. The power plug rested on a bumpout on the case floor and I didn't realize that it caused the SATA connection to come slightly unplugged which cause the drive to be corrupted with no way to recover. Had to reformat the drive and start over. In a MDD Mac this can only be used in one of the optical drive bays and still have room for the adapter.