Syba SY-BIR-IDESA IDE/SATA Converter Bi-Directional IDE to SATA

by Syba

Product Details

• Product Dimensions: 4.5 x 1.5 x 6.5 inches ; 3.2 ounces
• Shipping Weight: 3.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Shipping: This item is also available for shipping to select countries outside the U.S.
• ASIN: B000MYK6SU
• California residents: Click here for Proposition 65 warning.
• Item model number: SY-BIR-IDESA
• Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (29 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #16,456 in Electronics (See Top 100 in Electronics)
  • #22 in Automotive > Replacement Parts > Exhaust & Emissions > Catalytic Converters & Parts > Catalytic Converters
• Date first available at Amazon.com: August 21, 2008

Product Description

SYBA SATA/IDE 2WAY Converter JM

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

18 of 19 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Works well, price is excellent. SpinRite trick for SATA drives., September 4, 2009

By 

Mike - See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Syba SY-BIR-IDESA IDE/SATA Converter Bi-Directional IDE to SATA (Personal Computers)

So your old PATA (IDE) drives are starting to fail, as is happening to me. What to do? Replace with another IDE drive?

You can hardly find new IDE drives anymore. If you can, they're more expensive than a 1 TB SATA, don't have as much cache, don't have the raw speed from perpendicular recording, etc. PATA doesn't seem the way to go for future expansion. No, a new SATA drive is the way to go, but your old motherboard never heard of SATA. How to make them talk to each other...

The solution? This converter! As a bonus, unlike a SATA PCI expansion card, this needs no drivers and is bi-directional. So you can run your old IDE drives into the SATA ports on a newer motherboard whose single IDE channel is being used already by your DVD burners. Might be useful someday for transferring / cloning from an old drive to new.

As a bonus, if you run SpinRite to maintain your SATA drives ([...]), you know that SpinRite is somewhat SATA challenged. It can't see SMART info thru SATA and takes forever to run the drive using PIO. But if you plug your SATA drive into the IDE port using this converter, voilà, SpinRite sees the SMART data and runs faster!

I've noticed there are other bi-directional converters out there. This one is nice for its low profile. Some of the others stick out perpendicular to the IDE connector and I'm not sure they'd fit a typical case.

Only ten bucks. Keep it in your bag of tricks for working on others' computers.

I had no problems with mine. The instructions are a bit thin, but basically, plug it in to an IDE slot on your mobo (the slide switch will already be set from the factory for this), plug in the provided Y-power connector (red LED on) and plug the supplied SATA cable into your drive. Of course, you'll loose the dual channel capability of your IDE port. But that's to be expected with SATA signaling.

It's only SATA 1 compliant, probably a limitation of the IDE port itself. But I haven't seen a SATA II drive yet that can burst beyond 150 GB/sec anyway. Nor would it matter in practice. Some people say on NewEgg reviews that if you have a SATA I/II jumper on your drive, you have to set it to I for this converter. The drive I'm using now is SATA II, but has no such jumper. So I can't say.

I haven't tried this backward yet, going from an IDE drive to SATA. Same procedure, except change the slide switch position.

I plan to do some benchmarking soon... the mobo I'm using now supported only very early SATA I and I suspect my new WD Caviar Black SATA drive will be faster using IDE UDMA 6 than crippled native SATA 1. I'll try to comment on that when I have the data.

I haven't tried it on CD/DVD burner. Don't know that I will.

For $10, how can you go wrong?

12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars IDE to SATA works great!!!, November 10, 2009

By 

William Shreffler - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Syba SY-BIR-IDESA IDE/SATA Converter Bi-Directional IDE to SATA (Personal Computers)

I bought two of these to convert my IDE hard drive and IDE DVD burner over to SATA as I have a newer board type, and a lot of the new boards only put one IDE controller on them, and I have 6 SATA port on my system. So I thought why not use some of them and see if the my system might run a little better with everything on the same type of controller. I had a little problem at first after reading the instructions and thinking that they were DOA. Because my system did not see my IDE drives on the SATA port after install. After doing some research I discovered that I needed to move the jumper on my drive from Master and Slave to Cable select. Once that was done, it all fired up and worked like a champ. After I got it all running, I got to my Desktop and started checking things out. Making sure I could get to all my files, and checking response time. The system was a lot snappier, everything just clicked right along. These things are great and I like the response time I getting out of my IDE hard drive and DVD burner. These are a great buy at a very good price.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars SATA HDD converted to IDE = poor audio/video quality, March 1, 2010

By 

linus_nc "linus_nc" (NC) - See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Syba SY-BIR-IDESA IDE/SATA Converter Bi-Directional IDE to SATA (Personal Computers)

I bought this converter hoping that I could convert my newer 250gb SATA hard drive to IDE so that I can use it to replace a 20gb IDE hard drive. I mainly use this computer to watch video and listen to music even though it's getting old (pentium-4). After installing this converter, I can transfer files onto the SATA drive no problem, but i get all kinds of crackling noise and popping sounds from my speakers when playing music or video from the converted SATA drive. The video (mkv, avi) is also very jittery and starts & stops frequently. The computer even downgraded the SATA drive to PIO mode after playing a couple songs, which means the converter or drive itself is having major communication issues. My feeling is that the converter is fine for routine backups of files, or even basic computing like ms office. But FORGET audio/video. I would be interested to hear if anyone has experienced a/v related issues after installing this converter. Or.. has anyone tried to burn a CD or DVD using this converter connected to their SATA CD/DVD burner? <---That answer would help solve this problem.