SATA drive and PATA-only motherboard

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Sun, Jan 11, 2009 at 10:18:25PM -0500, D. Hugh Redelmeier wrote:
> SATA drives are cheaper and larger these days.
> I want to use SATA drives with computers without SATA controllers.
> I don't want to add a PCI card SATA controller because I'm short of PCI slots.
> I don't want to use USB-to-SATA (or is that SATA-to-USB) because I expect that
> would be a large performance hit.
> So I'd like to use a SATA-HDD to PATA host adapter.
> 
> Does anyone have any experience with these?
> 
> Here's what I've discovered so far:
> 
> - terminology is unclear.  Does SATA to IDE mean that the drive is
>   SATA or IDE (PATA)?
> 
> - some converters appear to be bidirectional (i.e. they will work as
>   SATA HDD to PATA host converter or as a PATA HDD to SATA host
>   converter).  But the documentation is ambiguous.  Is this possible?
>   Likely?

Yes the majority work both ways.

> - a normal PATA controller socket supports a cable with two drives
>   connected: master and slave.  The vast majority of converters seem
>   to take one PATA socket to connect only one SATA drive.  Is this
>   intrinsic to the protocols or just what the market wants?

They tend to connect to the cable as a drive does, so multiple drives
depends on your ide cable.  The convertor has a master/slave jumper as
IDE drives always do.

> - The SATA HDD to PATA controller converters seem to have female PATA
>   connectors so they plug directly into the socket where an IDE cable
>   would normally go.  It would make sense to me that if they supported
>   only one SATA drive, they could connect to the master or slave
>   connector of an IDE cable instead if the gender were male (like an
>   IDE drive).  Besides, the converters appear to be mechanically
>   awkward to plug into a motherboard (the motherboard IDE sockets are
>   often closely packed).  Why do they make adapters this way?

Hmm, the ones I have seem have the connector to attach to the cable,
although I guess to attach to the drive to turn it into sata would
require the other connector.

> - Canada computers sells an adapter.  Their site has very little
>   documentation and spotty inventory:
>     http://www.canadacomputers.com/index.php?do=ShowProduct&cmd=pd&pid=019312&cid=CA.742.630
>   So does XpressCanada, but that seems to be a front for Canada
>   Computers (same head office).  The price is lower but you have
>   to get it shipped, so the cost isn't lower:
>     http://www.xpresscanada.com/index.php?do=ShowProduct&cmd=pd&pid=019312&cid=CA.742.630
> 
> - Deal Extreme has a bunch of converters.  It is very hard to tell how
>   well they work.  (DX is a great source of cheap junk but I'm not
>   confident that their quality control is great.)

Now one concern is that, many older IDE controllers only support LBA28
IDE, which means 137GB is the largest drive they can run.  LBA48
supports much larger.  Does your controller support LBA48?  Do these
adapters support LBA48?

This one looks like the idea of what you want:
http://www.tigerdirect.ca/applications/searchtools/item-details.asp?EdpNo=1567086&csid=ITD&body=MAIN

The reviews seem to indicate it works great for some people and not for
others, although a number of the ones that claim it doesn't work appear
to have tried to use it in reverse which it doesn't do (as in tried to
use it to connect IDE drives to SATA controllers).

-- 
Len Sorensen
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