Ide HDD to sata
 

I've got an Abit an7 mboard in my pc which has onboard sata, my hdd is curently on one of the ide channels and I was thinking of moving it to one of the sata ones. Abit do 2 converters but I don't know which one I need or where to but them from but I've seen one on ebuyer for about £4.50. Will this work just as well? If not does anyone know where I can get the abit ones from and which one I need, cos' to me it looks like either of them will do. Any help would be appreciated.

Re: Ide HDD to sata
 

I'm not sure what you have seen for £4.50 but I think it will not be enough.

SATA drives use different power connections, and data cable connections to IDE drives. You need to be able to covert both.

A quick google found this site, which shows what you might need (not saying it's the best option.
http://granitedigital.com/catalog/pg...idgeboards.htm

By the time you've paid those sort of costs, you might as well have bought another HD and keep the existing one for backup purposes.

Re: Ide HDD to sata
 

this is what i've seen
http://www.ebuyer.com/customer/produ...duct_uid=60612

Re: Ide HDD to sata
 

Yeah I'd reccomend you get a SATA hard drive.
Plugging an IDE hard drive on to SATA will not really give you advantages.
If you wish, you can leave the Hard drive in there as IDE and then add a SATA drive so you have two drives.
A Sata drive will have its own much thinner data cable that plugs into the Sata connector on the motherboard and its own type of power connector.

Re: Ide HDD to sata
 

I have the data cable supplied with the mboard I thought I could plug this dongle in the back of the hdd connect the sata data cable to it but use the the normal 4 pin power connector

Re: Ide HDD to sata
 

You will but why would you want to? It will be no faster, infact due to the method of cable conversion it might be slower. The only real use for this would be if you had no available ide sockets.

Re: Ide HDD to sata
 

You wont see any real speed increase.

As for the power connector.... 4 pin connectors are used on IDE drives. SATA drives use a flater connector.
Be careful with SATA cables by the way, they break easily.
You can easily buy SATA to 4 Pin power connector adapters.

Why exactly do you wish to connect your IDE drive through SATA ?

Re: Ide HDD to sata
 

Point taken I'd not thought of it being slower, one of the reasons I was thinking of doing it is that I have a couple of other hdds (one is exactly the same make and model as the one I'm using already)floating around somewhere and I was thinking of putting one of them in as well, which would leave the ide sockets free for future expansion

Re: Ide HDD to sata
 

I would recomend using SATA with a SATA drive I have found this good and it has allowed me to use the IDE for trouble sorting of the childrens HDD when they mess them up beyond use...

Re: Ide HDD to sata
 

Wow, that cheap ebuyer one IS a SATA converter, unbelievable price.

Reasons to use a converter (or two)
1. Pair of reasonably quick IDE drives, and put them as a RAID pair on the SATA RAID (on many boards, SATA is a RAID controller).
2. Need to clear IDE cneels, maybe for two simultaneous CD/DVD writers, one per channel.
3. Want less clutter of large IDE cables.

Generally, a SATA converter will have minimal effect on the drive's performance. Unless you had two active drives on one IDE channel, or would do, the perfomance will generally not improve by moving them to SATA.

Re: Ide HDD to sata
 

Yes I have raid on my mboard and it had crossed my minf to stripe them, but wouldn't I have to reformat the drive I have in my pc now to set it up?

If I went down the sata route can anyone recommend one around the 80gb - 120gb sizewise?

Re: Ide HDD to sata
 

If you put Drive 0 in as your current data drive and want a RAID1 then put a Drive 1 in with identical specs the RAID drivers should automatically start the R1 process.

Oh and don't try putting your SATA cable into the jumper pins of the drive, it will fit but the drive will not respond :dunce: , minor panic when I tried that.

I like Maxtor drives, the MaxDrive config utility is good too. Their SATA 120Gb 8mB cache 7200RPms are pretty good value.

Re: Ide HDD to sata
 

Just in case anyone is interested, I decided to buy the converters from ebuyer and they seem to be fine.

Re: Ide HDD to sata
 

thanks for the feedback, glad it worked out ok :tu:

Re: Ide HDD to sata
 

So with that, does that mean that you can have 4 x IDE devices AND the SATA ones too?

Re: Ide HDD to sata
 

Yes, with almost any SATA & IDE Mobo you can have 4 IDE devices (2 channels with Master/Slave) and two SATA. The convertor is only needed if you have old IDE drives and you don't want to change the drives to native SATA.

Re: Ide HDD to sata
 

Abit do exactly what you wanted, a Serializer 2, small unit that plugs into and IDE devicealowing it to connect to a SATA port. Everyone is right though when they say you won't see and performance gains but you hardly will with a SATA hard disk anyway. Nearly all current models are just standards drives with an additional parallel converter chip on them that allows them to take serial data. The Abit thing just does this in reverse. If you want to see a preformance gain go for a SATA drive with 10000rpm spindle speed or 16Mb cache. Hopefully SATA2 drives will be true SATA drives and not just conversions.

Re: Ide HDD to sata
 

The greatest benefit is from having the onboard RAID 0 or 1 (depending on what you want to use it for).

Re: Ide HDD to sata
 

Hmm, I would see the greatest benefit in having 4 hard drives & 2 CD roms in 1 PC.

MIght look for one of them myself, for an external caddy so I can add the older drives, do the buisness & then take em out again.

Re: Ide HDD to sata
 

I use 7 hdd and 3 optical drives in my pc Neo platinum mobo only came with 2 ide controlers and the nvidia sata had 4 slots. I soon populated all these and was left with 2 ide hdd.I bought an ide / raid card for less than £20 and it wokrs fine(except I cant find 64 bit drivers for it lol )

Re: Ide HDD to sata
 

Why? What for? Are they in RAID5?

Re: Ide HDD to sata
 

PVR uses 2 O/s=1 Back up = 1 media=1 games=2

lite on cdr = 1 best cd rewriter ive ever found writes in all modes,back ups anything

lite on dvd rom simple to make multi region without cracked firmware

pioneer dvd 108 only use pioneer firmware also best rewriter ive found for compatability

Re: Ide HDD to sata
 

sorry for the late reply but yes I have the potential to do that

Re: Ide HDD to sata
 

you can add raid to a pc for less than £20

Re: Ide HDD to sata
 

Isn't that for killing bugs? :D

I thought that Raid was using several hard drives but all with the same data on for security/backup purposes rather than lots of HDD's all with different data on ?

Re: Ide HDD to sata
 

It is,you do not have to set up an array though,I bought a pci raid card with 2 ide channels for about £15,thi s on its own non raid can support 4 devices either optical or hard drive.In raid it supports mirroring or stripe,you can buy cards cheap with either ide or sata

http://www.eclipsecomputers.com/prod...de=IO-PIDE133R

http://www.ebuyer.com/customer/produ...duct_uid=48670
non raid sata card

Re: Ide HDD to sata
 

So I can put 4 hard drives on the mobo ports, get another PCI card and add 2 hard drives & 2 cd's to that.
Cool.

SATA ones too if I could ever afford them :D

Re: Ide HDD to sata
 

you would want to keep 1 optical on your main ide to boot from as pci cards will need drivers to install xp on,but basically the answer is yes,as long as the card chip sets are different you can add as many as you board allows,I have 2 of my sata drives rigged up to a back plate sata converter turning them into external,my board came with this converter,one of the cards on ebuyer has one internal and one external,as long as the drive has the the sata power connector and you have bought the correct leads these external drives are hot swapable