Should work just fine.

You might want to try taking the cover off the old DVD drive and cleaning the lens before deciding to replace it.

My PATA-SATA adapters have worked perfectly for using modern solid-state drives on older hardware.

Beware ones that don't support DMA! Anything from JMicron (JBM) is suspect (i.e. probably won't do DMA).

I have used two different styles - one that plugs into the back of a SATA drive and you attach a ribbon cable normally (obviously only supports one drive), and one that plugs into the IDE connector on the motherboard, and connects to the drive using SATA cables. I prefer the latter model as it is cleaner (no ribbon cables), AND supports 2 drives (has 2 SATA ports for the master/slave arrangement support by PATA). If you go the former style, look for ones with a jumper that allows master/slave selection (these ones also usually are not JBM and will support DMA).

All models are cheap as chips on ebay...from China of course.

I have used both types too. AFAIK most are JMicron and those can work fine. All of mine use JMicron chips of some sort. I think they might be the same chip in different package sizes. They support ATA standards from PIO through UDMA 133, and connect the drive at SATA 150 so it's as good as you can get. I measured a SSD at about 95MB/s on one, which is essentially the limit of UDMA 100/133.

If you want to find a ton of discussion about them, search for XBox SATA adapters (for the original XBox). The XBox is picky about them so you can find what people say work there and it will work for PC. The XBox uses a plain PC UDMA 33/66 interface.

swaaye wrote:

I have used both types too. AFAIK most are JMicron and those can work fine. All of mine use JMicron chips of some sort. I think they might be the same chip in different package sizes. They support ATA standards from PIO through UDMA 133, and connect the drive at SATA 150 so it's as good as you can get. I measured a SSD at about 95MB/s on one, which is essentially the limit of UDMA 100/133.

If you want to find a ton of discussion about them, search for XBox SATA adapters (for the original XBox). The XBox is picky about them so you can find what people say work there and it will work for PC. The XBox uses a plain PC UDMA 33/66 interface.

When I said "won't work" I meant "won't do DMA" (fixed). Have you tried enabling DMA in the device properties under Win98 using a JBM based board?

squiggly wrote:

When I said "won't work" I meant "won't do DMA" (fixed). Have you tried enabling DMA in the device properties under Win98 using a JBM based board?

I've had them working with 9x and XP in DMA modes. However like you noticed some are flaky. Some drives/motherboards are pickier than others about them. I'm sure some of them are just defective too because I have a feeling quality control varies a lot.

I have also used them in 4 old XBox projects. They run UDMA 66 in those (it's displayed within the dashboard). The consoles are especially picky about what they'll boot with.

Lately I've just been using an 80GB IDE drive in my old PC setups instead of messing with the adapters. Extra speed just doesn't really matter for 9x. Even a typical 80GB HDD is super fast relative to a contemporary 9x hard drive. And you know a real IDE drive isn't adding extra stability problems.

Been using the Startech IDE2SAT2 myself and it seems to work really well (Marvell controller). Every drive I've thrown at it works and DMA seems to work. Definitely a case of you get what you pay for since I tried one of the super cheap adapters and while it performed OK at first it became unusably slow, but the only complaint I have on this thing is that it uses the floppy power connector (molex adapter provided).

Haven't tried using it with a DVD drive, but the spec sheet says it supports them. However don't forget that you lose DOS redbook audio support with a SATA drive.

For use with hdd it is okay, but since you mentioned that you are planning to replace your dvd drive, serial ATA optical drive don't seem to have the cd audio output(at least i never seen one), so dos games that relied on cd audio would not work properly.

Blzut3 wrote:

Haven't tried using it with a DVD drive, but the spec sheet says it supports them. However don't forget that you lose DOS redbook audio support with a SATA drive.

Sad but true. I bought a stack of new (old stock) Liteon DVD (reader only) drives a while ago just for this reason....about $5 each for a lot of 10 or so from some seller on feeBay. I'll be really pissed when/if they all die...I actually love playing mid-90s "cinematic adventure games" that all made heavy use of CD audio.

There should be plenty of IDE DVD drives available on eBay. Search for IDE, not PATA.