July 27, 2007
This small adapter allows you to connect SATA drives to older parallel IDE ports on your motherboard. Works well and very inexpensive
This is the final one of my SATA adapter adventures. This adapter plugs directly into an IDE port on your motherboard. You connect a SATA cable and power to it. Utterly seamless and requires no drivers. it comes with a SATA cable and molex power connection cable.
I connected my 250GB SATA drive to it and have successfully copied over 75GB of data in one go from existing SATA drive to it.
If you have a mixture of IDE and SATA ports on your motherboard, then this is the perfect way to convert one of the IDE ports over.
Highly recommended and very inexpensive (€5.46 including P&P on eBay)
Rated 5/5 on Jul 27 2007 by Mr C
Posted in Uncategorized | 18 Comments »
July 27, 2007
SATA and PIDE RAID PCI Card
This PCI card has 2x internal SATA, 1x external PCI and 1x internal IDE ports. Very cheap and ideal for older tower machines with lots of drive bays.
Given the only partial success I had with the SATA to USB adapter, I tried again with a very inexpensive (€11 on eBay yet again!) PCI card. This one had a good mix of ports 2x internal SATA, 1x external PCI and 1x internal IDE.
It came with a single SATA cable and drivers mini-CD which identified it as a VIA VT6421 RAID Controller. Installation was trivial.
As a backup I had also ordered an even cheaper IDE->SATA adapter and installed this at the same time as the PCI card. I’ll review that next.
I decided not to connect the SATA drive to the new PCI card but in fact to connect the DVD burner to it on the PIDE port. The only difficulty here was the orientation of the socket forces you to bend the IDE cable back on itself.
The DVD drive is working flawlessly and I still have 3 more SATA connectors for any more SATA drives that I add. Performance seems good and I’ll report back if I add a SATA drive to it.
Highly recommended if you need more drive ports. As it was an eBay purchase you’ll need to browse that vendors eBay shop to find the latest one on auction.
Rated 4/5 on Jul 27 2007 by Mr C
Posted in Uncategorized | 3 Comments »
