Installing a SATA hard drive on IDE motherboard

[SCT Technology]

I have a Dell Dimension B110 with Windows XP Home installed. I would
like to connect a 1TB SATA hard drive using a SATA to IDE converter as
the secondary, internal drive for storage. (Primary drive is IDE and
there is no SATA support on the Dimension motherboard...therefore I'm
wanting to use the converter.) Does anyone know if this configuration
will function as I would like?

Thanks for the feedback,

Steve

 

[larry moe 'n curly]

I have a Dell Dimension B110 with Windows XP Home installed. I would
like to connect a 1TB SATA hard drive using a SATA to IDE converter as
the secondary, internal drive for storage. (Primary drive is IDE and
there is no SATA support on the Dimension motherboard...therefore I'm
wanting to use the converter.) Does anyone know if this configuration
will function as I would like?

I have a converter based on a SunPlus chip (the other major chip for
converters is from JMicron), and I would not recommend it, except to
use IDE hard drives with SATA controllers. I could not get any IDE
optical drives to work with it, and SATA drives from Seagate, WD, and
Samsung would eventually cause the HDAT2 diagnostic to eventually
freeze when scanning sectors, in 20 minutes to 5 hours, with no
consistency. I did not test other HDs. No other diagnostic I tried
did that, but the failure with HDAT2 was enough to make me avoid using
SATA drives with it.

Before you buy a SATA-IDE converter, read all the reviews at NewEgg
and Amazon, especially the highly detailed ones that are negative.

I would rather buy a PCI or PCI-e SATA controller that supports SATA/
300 (also called SATA II). Cards that support only SATA/150 (SATA I)
may not recognize SATA/300 drives, and some SATA drives don't have a
jumper to select between SATA/300 and SATA/150 but instead require
that a software utility be run to change the maximum speed. That
requires having a SATA controller that properly recognizes SATA/300
drives.

 

[Paul]

I have a Dell Dimension B110 with Windows XP Home installed. I would
like to connect a 1TB SATA hard drive using a SATA to IDE converter as
the secondary, internal drive for storage. (Primary drive is IDE and
there is no SATA support on the Dimension motherboard...therefore I'm
wanting to use the converter.) Does anyone know if this configuration
will function as I would like?

Thanks for the feedback,

Steve

It can. You have to consider first, whether the vintage of computer
supports drives over 137GB or not. As near as I can tell, the B110
is from 2006, and the transition year was 2003, so you're likely
OK there. Your WinXP install should be patched to at least SP1
before you connect the drive (which most users would already have
done by now). The machine likely shipped with some Service Pack
already added to the OS image, so you've likely met this already
as well.

I use an adapter here, with a 250GB SATA drive, and didn't have a problem
with it. It uses a Marvell 88SA8040. It comes with a power cable (some
other adapters don't include cables). It has a jumper for "Master" or
"Slave", and no cable select. You could jumper the other drive on the
IDE cable to take that into account. If you used two of these
adapters on the same IDE cable, one would be Master and the other Slave.
Note that once this is plugged into the IDE cable, it is hard to remove
and you have to be careful not to bend the pins on the IDE end. The SATA
end, on the other hand, is easy to work with. So when you're finished using
this, you would disconnect the ribbon cable entirely from the computer
and work on removing the adapter from the IDE cable, outside the computer.

http://www.startech.com/item-specs/...0-Pin-Male-IDE-to-SATA-Adapter-Converter.aspx

There is only one review on Newegg. And three reviews on Amazon. Presumably
people are buying cheaper adapters.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16812200156

http://www.amazon.com/Ide-Sata-Driv...2?ie=UTF8&s=electronics&qid=1264227930&sr=8-2

I haven't tested it with any SATA optical drives, because I don't own any.

In the worst case, if the drive could not be made to function adequately
using an adapter like that, it can always be placed in a USB enclosure.
Or you could add a SATA card to a PCI slot. Or a Firewire PCI card and
Firewire enclosure. Or a SATA PCI card with ESATA external port and an
ESATA enclosure. You get the basic idea. There are plenty of ways of
connecting the drive, and if you're out of PCI slots to add cards, then
any USB or Firewire connector on the computer would be an alternative. My
machine boots from USB, so having a drive in a USB enclosure doesn't
have an adverse effect on what I can do with it. YMMV on that (it
is a function of your BIOS design).

Paul

 

[Paul]

I have wondered if you format a drive using the jumper to slow it
down, could you use the drive in another machine without the jumper?

SATA cable --------------------------------- Drive
150MB/sec or 300MB/sec 7200RPM, all the time.


The "force150" jumper has nothing to do with what is actually
stored on the drive. You can insert or remove the jumper and
all it does, is change the cable rate between the drive and
the motherboard. Normally, SATA drives negotiate the cable rate. It
is in cases where the negotiation fails, that the "force150" jumper
provides its main benefit (allowing the negotiation to arrive at
"150" as the setting to use). Some VIA chipset motherboards require
the user to insert the "force150" jumper, to get the drives to
be detected and be visible.

I've tested my system here, both with the "force150" jumper installed
and with it removed, and I can't tell the difference in terms of
performance. In Linux, I might note a message indicating what cable
rate is being used, but otherwise, I'd be oblivious as to what
rate it was running at.

The cable rate is more important, if you're using a SATA SSD with
200MB/sec+ transfer rates. But for the crappy rotating hard drives,
other performance issues swamp out what the cable is doing to you.
So it's not a big deal as far as I can see. I don't sit around
all day with a stop-watch checking these things. I don't notice
any "extra snappiness" when the "force150" jumper is removed.
Windows doesn't boot any faster. Firefox doesn't open any faster.

In the above example diagram, the disk spins at a constant 7200RPM,
whether the cable is 150MB/sec or 300MB/sec. The spindle doesn't
change speeds. The flying height requires reasonably controlled
conditions to work properly, so making big changes in the RPM
would be a mistake and could lead to a head crash. Some of the
latest drives have some means to dynamically monitor flying height,
so a drive like that may have options as to what it can safely
do. Older technology has no reason to be changing the RPM at all
and won't load the heads to the platter, until the RPM rate is
correct and constant.

Paul