Customer Reviews

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

5 star:		(9)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(10)

 

 

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?

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.

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.

I thought I had made a mistake in purchasing this adapter. When I first connected all the cables, it simply did not work at all. I was just about to trash it when I discovered the root of the problem. As one reviewer mentioned that the pins on one of the molex plugs were loose and literally one or all of the pins were falling out and perhaps could not be properly connected to the female connector. I wasn't about to trash something that I paid for and especially waited quite a while to receive. Anyhow, I proceeded to glue the loose wires in the affected molex adapters so that they would not move when trying to connect both ends. Rather, I used shoe goo straight from the tube and let it set overnight. I also think that slow drying epoxy will do equally well. The next day, I now had a very sturdy connector with no loose pins and I immediately noticed that the HDD had power. It certainly makes a huge difference if your pins now line up straight and you now have power flowing through the devices. The first time I booted up, it was unsuccessful due to the incorrect switch setting. I immediately set the switch to the alternate mode ( SATA to IDE) and I was in business.

I also purchased the other Syba I/O Crest SATA to IDE adapter from Amazon and I had equal success with both. The advantage to this particular device is that it is bidirectional meaning that you can run a SATA device to an IDE/PATA motherboard. Personally, I think that extra $3 spent is worth the added price. Otherwise, a great product to own. I now wish that if they could improve the quality of their molex connectors (pins) and also use a 3.5" FDD power cable instead of a 1/8" jack that they will have a really outstanding product. The 3.5" FDD cables & molex power cable combinations are easily available from Amazon or other suppliers.

I made sure that the settings were right, plugged it in, and presto, my PATA drive talks on a SATA port.

Used this to connect my old Seagate 750GB IDE drive to new Win 7 / Ubuntu box. Recognized by BIOS and both O/S--no issues. I have IDE drive jumpered to C/S. Haven't benchmarked speed, but seems fine.

Great, cheap way to move old drives to a new system, or vice-versa.

I needed to quickly copy data off an old IDE drive, but my motherboard (Asus P7P55 WS SuperComputer) only has sata connectors. This device was perfect for my needs, as it is bi-directional, so I didn't need to worry that i wouldn't be able to plug the Hard drive into my mobo.

I plugged it in and my BIOS recognized it right away and I had no trouble copying data. The included directions (if you can call them that) weren't extremely helpful. So in-case you have trouble here's some guidance:
~There are two sets of wires included. One set is a combination of power connectors and the other "set" is just a single SATA connector. The first set contains two four-pin molex connectors (these are the two white ones), and one SATA power connector (I think that's the correct name. But it's the really thin one that's black).
~What isn't clear in the instructions is that you need to plug one of the molex connectors into the drive itself and then the other one into the power-connectors that run from your power supply.

Another key factor that you need to know is how your hard drive is positioned in the case. I ran into a problem where I could not fully close one side of my case because my hard drive bays face to the sides of the case, instead of the back, and the adapter was sticking out. For me this wasn't a big deal because I only needed the adapter temporarily, but if you are looking to use this adapter as a permanent solution, please note where the back of your hard drive is in your case.

I purchased two of these adapters to add an IDE HD and IDE DVD writer to my new SATA only PC. I read the reviews and decided to ignore the negative since it was pretty good ratings overall. After 4 hours of trying to install these things, I gave up. I didn't run into any cable issues, LED light lit up, everything connected well.

My problem was the BIOS never acknowledged I had the drive in the PC. Tried master, slave and CS; switching cables, ports but nothing worked. Thought at first it was just the unit since it seemed several had received lemons. So I tried the other with the same issues. Maybe it was because it was Windows 7? With that thought, I decided to try it in my other PC running XP Pro sp3. Same exact thing so I threw in the towel.

Seems like if you're lucky enough to get a working unit, you're good, but if you don't your in for a lot of wasted time and trouble.

The unit came with all the cables needed. The 3 page manual was very lacking on instruction and from further research, looks like the customer service leaves a lot to be desired with email responses that just tell you what is already in the manual.

Could be a mass produced product causing for hit and miss success. Since they're reasonably cheap, it cost more to get a RMA and ship them back to the manufacturer than it does to just cut your losses, maybe thats what they're banking on??

Word of advice... if you decide to take your chances on this... try it out quickly so you can return it thru Amazon and get your refund

I purchased this converter because it was inexpensive. It is also nice that it comes with all of the cables you need to connect it.

The reason I bought this was to add an extra SATA drive (Western Digital 500 GB SATA OEM Desktop Hard Drive WD5000AADS (Caviar Green)) to an IDE system. What I didn't realize (through my own ignorance) was that this product needs to be connected directly to your motherboard.

I thought I would just be able to daisy chain this product to the existing IDE ribbon cable. This connector is male on the IDE side so that is not possible. Unfortunately for me my motherboard has only 2 IDE slots: one for the bootable IDE drive, the second for my CD/DVD ROM drives.

I did temporarily replace my CD/DVD ROM drives with this product to connect the SATA drive. The product worked perfectly and I was able to format and mount the drive as additional storage.

I had bought this converter after numerous failed attempts to connect the drive via the native SATA port. Luckily for me, after extensive research, I was able to get the native SATA port on my motherboard to work. Now I keep this product in my equipment box in case anyone ever needs it.

If you are trying to mount SATA in an IDE system then my advice prior to buying this is to check that you have a spare IDE slot on your motherboard. If not, consider buying a different product. There are several other converters with female connectors that should, theoretically, allow you to daisy chain the SATA drive onto your existing IDE ribbon cable.

I had the old motherboard doens't have SATA ports. I bought this converter to use with the new SATA hard drive. Installation is very easy, just connect all the cables. The hard drive is working fine. Now, I can have the new SATA hard drive on my old motherboard, so I don't need to spend extra for the new SATA motherboard. Great product.