Some observations on SATA converters

[Arno Wagner]

I have recently tried two IDE-to-SATA converters, one by Promise and
one by ASUS. The Promise one comes in a little grey plastic box. The
one from Asus is "open-frame" and has a black foam-rubber insulation
on the bottom. The interessting thing is that both behaved
differently when I tried them with different IDE disks.

Setup: Epox 8kra2+ (VIA KT600) with onboard VIA SATA.
Athlon XP 2200+, 1GB RAM.
Linux 2.6.3

Converters: Promise "RockedHead 100"
Asus "SATA DONGLE XAY"

Disks: Seagate ST380021A (Barracuda IV 80GB)
Maxtor 6Y080L0 (DiamondMax Plus 9 80GB)
Samsung SP1614N (Spinpoint P80 160GB)

Promise Converter:
Samsung: not tried
Maxtor: works without problem at full disk speed
Seagate: works without problem at full disk speed

Asus Converter:
Samsung: works at full speed, but an attempt to resync
a RAID-5 array failed
Maxtor: drops down very soon to PIO because of errors
fails completely after some minutes
Seagate: works, but only about 50% disk speed on reading and
about 75% disk speed on writing.

All in all I have the impression these things still need time to
become commodity and "just work". The Promise one performs well, but
the ASUS seems to be extremely buggy. It might also be Linux problems.
With Kernel 2.6.1 the promise dongle did not work for data tansfers at
all (it could get the disk info though).

Please post experiences you have made with these things!

Regards,
Arno

 

[David Arnstein]

Please post experiences you have made with these things!

I have two grey plastic "Rocketheads," but they are not Promise.
Perhaps Promise bought the company that used to sell them? Anyway, I
attempted to use these converters with a Dell Dimension XPS PC. This
PC offers two SATA channels and the motherboard is basically an Intel
unit, although Dell always makes some nickel-and-dime cost reductions
on their boards.

I connected a newish Maxtor (DMA 133) disk, and a brand new Western
Digital (DMA 100) disk. In both cases, the PC BIOS could not detect
any disk drive, so I couldn't boot up at all. Technical support from
the manufacturer of the "Rockethead" converters was not helpful.