VOGONS


First post, by seleryba

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Hello Vogons.
I have a lot of SATA HDDs and I'd like to use them as replacements in my builds.
I saw various SATA to PATA adapters on the web. I wonder if it's good idea in two cases:

for the build from 1995 with PIO4,
for the build from 2003 with ATA/133

Do you have some experience with the speed or latency with those adaptors?

Reply 1 of 8, by candle_86

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I use the kingston ones, they work great

Reply 3 of 8, by Baoran

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I am kind of curious about this as well. Like how large hard drives work using them and what are transfer speeds like. There are many larger sata hard drives than there ever was when it comes to ide hard drives. I just recently got this PCI IDE card and based on info online it says it supports ide hard drives larger than 127Gb, but no idea how large that would be. What would happen if I would connect a 1Tb sata hard drive to it using such adapter?

Reply 4 of 8, by dionb

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Baoran wrote on 2020-01-22, 07:33:

I am kind of curious about this as well. Like how large hard drives work using them and what are transfer speeds like. There are many larger sata hard drives than there ever was when it comes to ide hard drives. I just recently got this PCI IDE card and based on info online it says it supports ide hard drives larger than 127Gb, but no idea how large that would be. What would happen if I would connect a 1Tb sata hard drive to it using such adapter?

These adapters just adapt the protocol, they don't in any way change HDD detection/size limits. So you're dependent on the capabilities of BIOS for that. If you use them with motherboard I/O, it's the motherboard BIOS that determines capabilities, if it's a card with BIOS, that BIOS determines them.

The 137GB limit comes from the original 28-bit addressing of IDE/LBA. To go beyond that limit, a new 48-bit LBA addressing was used. 48b allows 144PB. That should be enough for the next few years...

So 1TB > 137GB so you need 48b LBA, and 1TB <<144PB, so no problem there.

Reply 5 of 8, by jmarsh

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Some adapters will make 512b sector drives that are larger than 2TB appear as 4096b sector drives. Means they can't really be used without the adapter once formatted/partitioned.

Reply 6 of 8, by candle_86

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I used one to put a 2TB drive onto an promise TX2 133 card and it worked just fine

Reply 7 of 8, by gdjacobs

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cyclone3d wrote on 2020-01-22, 07:10:

I've been using the super generic ones from China. They seem to work just fine.

I've got two of them. Soldering was kind of iffy, so I touched them up before using them. They've performed great since. Better than UDMA66.

All hail the Great Capacitor Brand Finder

Reply 8 of 8, by SirNickity

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There's a cheap and ubiquitous one on Ebay that I've used to put SSDs in old consoles (Xbox) and a variant that was built as a replacement for the PlayStation 2 hard drive adapter. I've used the Ebay one for SSDifying my Mac Pro G4 Cube as well. No problems.