IDE to SATA converters

[Bob H]

I bought 3 Logilink IDE to SATA converters from ebay, and after having
tried one, it doesn't appear to work at all
The drive I plugged the converter card into was my Hitachi 160Gb Primary
Slave drive. I connected the SATA cables then booted up the machine ,
but the said drive was now not recognised or not showing in the BIOS.
After reading the brief information on the back of the package it says
to connect the converter card to an open IDE port on the motherboard
etc, and this would convert a SATA drive to IDE.

I want to convert IDE to SATA and I thought these converters would do
the job.
What am I missing?

Thanks

 

[Paul]

I bought 3 Logilink IDE to SATA converters from ebay, and after having
tried one, it doesn't appear to work at all
The drive I plugged the converter card into was my Hitachi 160Gb Primary
Slave drive. I connected the SATA cables then booted up the machine ,
but the said drive was now not recognised or not showing in the BIOS.
After reading the brief information on the back of the package it says
to connect the converter card to an open IDE port on the motherboard
etc, and this would convert a SATA drive to IDE.

I want to convert IDE to SATA and I thought these converters would do
the job.
What am I missing?

Thanks

Jumper the drive to master ?

Paul

 

[Bob H]

I have just done that as far as I can tell. The Hitachi drive was/is
still in situ, and I placed a jumper across the 2 left hand pins as you
look at the drive from the back. I then re booted into BIOS, but the
drive was still not recocnised.

Thanks

 

[Bob H]

Well it says on the packaging that it is a IDE to SATA converter, but
then in the blurb talks about SATA to IDE.
Thanks for the link, and I know Maplins do a similar one but is dearer,
at about £22.

 

[Bob H]

Just an update here:
After reading the documentation over again, it only tells you how to
convert from sata to ide, not the other way round as I wanted.
So to call it a IDE to SATA converter does not seem correct as it should
be called a SATA to IDE Converter.

 

[Paul]

Just an update here:
After reading the documentation over again, it only tells you how to
convert from sata to ide, not the other way round as I wanted.
So to call it a IDE to SATA converter does not seem correct as it should
be called a SATA to IDE Converter.

As the poster "A New Day" points out, there are SATA to IDE,
IDE to SATA, and bidirectional adapters. The chip on the
bidirectional one, can use a jumper to set the direction
of translation. In addition to the three types, there
are older ones that don't support ATAPI (optical drives).
And judging by the comments in Newegg, there are even
cases where that junk will recognize an optical and
not a hard drive. So a real mixed bag of results.

Sometimes, the same product is marketed under more than one
brand name. You can see an example, in the first two links.
The Newegg pages are valuable, because the customer reviews
contain lots of test results, as to what worked or didn't work.
If you can match the visual appearance of your adapter, to the
pictures on the Newegg pages, you may get more info about it.
This particular product seems to use a SIL3811 (with some
other company name on it).

http://www.digitalpromo.co.uk/logilink-sata-to-ide-atapi-drive-adaptor-converter-retail-p-3526.html

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16812206002

http://www.rosewill.com/products/413/productDetail.htm

http://www.rosewill.com/RosewillSoftware/RC204 User manual v1.1.pdf

In that example, the SIL3811 is unidirectional, and converts
older IDE drives for usage with SATA only motherboard hosts.
The SIL3811 is depicted, connected to the drive on the right.

http://www.siliconimage.com/products/product.aspx?id=79

This might be one of the bidirectional chips.

http://www.jmicron.com/Product_JM20330.htm

And a retail example of a bidirectional using that chip.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16812186032

http://www.syba.com/Product/Info/Id/296

Paul

 

[Bob H]

Thanks for the links Paul.
The converter I have is the Logilink one on the first link, but it says
IDE to SATA on mine.
Actually, I now rather think that the one I have is meant to connect to
a open IDE port on my board, which would mean it is not what I wanted.

 

[Bob H]

Somewhere on teh intarwebs "Bob H" typed:

I bought a couple ~$20 PCI cards, each with two SATA-150 ports and a single
ATA/100 connector (supports 2 devices).

They've sorted any drive-swapping problems I had nicely, They're constantly
being swapped into machines as I need them. When the boot drive is on the
PCI card I just set the BIOS to boot from "SCSI".

(It's quite good having a Tualatin Celeron 1.1GHz CPU (running on 133MHz FSB
at 1.46GHz) on a 440BX chipset booting from a SATA HDD. That's still a very
capable 'communication, internet and word processing' machine, just gotta
get around to buying a USB2 card for it as the mobo ports are only USB1.1.)

Thanks for that, I think I'll go for one of those myself.