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SATA to IDE adapters: which/what/why?


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A manufacturer page for an adapter based on Marvell 88SA8052, with leds and M/S jumper, but without a "fence" around the IDE connector (I really hated those on old HDDs/mobos). The specs say 1.5Gbit, though the Marvell chip should support 3.0Gbit.

That is the famous "Rosewill IDE-SATA07 adapter" based on Marvell 88SA8052, referenced in this thread elsewhere and said to be very good. I actively looked for it but did not find any actually for sale, regardless of whether they would ship to Brazil or not. It seems its production has been discontinued. It was the successor to the long-ago discontinued legendary "Rosewill IDE-SATA01 adapter", which was based on the Marvell 88SA8040.

Marvell wrote the Firmware for the Highpoint Card I mentioned before that does not support more than 2TiB, so it is possible there could be an issue above 2TiB.

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Sure. But I doubt we'll ever know for sure, since they seem to have all but disappeared, with or without the Rosewill brand.

At least judging from their site listing, that UK seller still has the item, though on a 2 month backorder.

BTW, I didn't know scanners could take photos of 3D objects that well. :)

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  • 2 weeks later...

Some questions about the speed that can I achieve in my old PIII PC:

If I want to change my PATA HD and use a SATA HD with a SATA to IDE Adapter (based on the JMicron JM20330) what would be the transfer speed R/W and the possibility of booting the Win98SE OS?

The writing speed for my PATA internal HD is now about 20MB/sec, how fast will be in the case of a SATA HD?

A bit OT, but not very far ...

Last year I added a USB2 PCI card to my PIII PC, but the write speed has reached a maximum transfer rate of only 6 MB/sec (and not 20MB/sec - stated in product specs!). My other USB1.1 ports go up to 800KB/sec transfer rate, so overall the addition of the PCI card has been a marked improvement.

But I discarded the possibility of adding a SATA PCI card, because of previous experience about USB PCI cards (too low speed of the PCI card bus? Or maybe I'm wrong?)

Thank you in advance.

I41Mar

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By adding a good SATA PCI card you may get > 137GB support (due to the card's onboard BIOS extension), which a SATA - PATA adapter simply does not provide.

That said, the adapters based on JM20330 simply convert the interface, but don't affect much the final tranfer rates. The Toshiba disk I used in most of my tests is a particularly slow SATA I disk, and it gave me 35 MB/s when connected to the SATA port, and the same using the adapter to the mobo PATA controller, and still the same using the Pomise card with the adapter. Now, using a 500 GB 7200.11 Seagate SATA II disk, duly jumpered to SATA I, I've got around 90 MB/s, while my main disk in that setup, which is a 80 GB 7200.10 Seagate PATA disk gives consistently 75 MB/s, being connected to the 1st PATA channel as Master (all these are sequencial read times), So, I think the adapter hasn't much influence in the tranfer rates at all, but your mobo and the actual disk native speed sure do.

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The writing speed for my PATA internal HD is now about 20MB/sec, how fast will be in the case of a SATA HD?
That sounds more like a limitation of your motherboard IDE controller (is it very old?) or something wrong with drivers. Any HDD from maybe the last 10 years would be able to do more than that. Even if your controller is limited to 33MB/sec, I think you should expect more like 25MB/sec. Of course, all that assumes you're checking raw sequential speed (and at the beginning of the HDD if it's very old).

If your onboard controller is 33MB/sec, a PCI SATA controller should be faster. How much faster would also depend on your specific mobo chipset, I guess newer in general would be better. PCI is 133MB/sec cumulatively. Even with overhead and other concurrent traffic, I'd expect a SATA controller to exceed 33MB/sec and in ideal conditions maybe even triple that.

write speed has reached a maximum transfer rate of only 6 MB/sec
And read?
(and not 20MB/sec - stated in product specs!)
Specs could lie. :)

A PCI USB2 controller I have gets me about 16MB/sec. It could also be the limitation of the USB device, but I think it's the controller in this case. Either way it's far from saturating PCI.

Edited by shae
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  • 1 month later...

What you are asking is a "piggyback" board that fits in the back of a SATA 2.5" HD and makes it IDE/ATA compatible to a laptop (44 pin) connection AND that fits inside your notebook? :w00t:

Such adapters are (AFAIK) VERY rare, and it is doubtful whether there is enough space inside the notebook, here is one:

http://www.cooldrives.com/2sahadrtoide.html

So I actually ordered one of these adapters. Unfortunately I wasn't able to find a slim one, only a similar thing to the one mentioned above.

I checked my notebook and I think it should fit with an SSD after removing the case to make it look like this:

Western%20Digital%20SiliconEdge%20Blue%20SSD%20apart.jpg

EDIT

I received the stuff today ;) and it does fit when the drive is not fixed which shouldn't be an issue with SSD.

Edited by tomasz86
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To connect a Sata cable on a Pata disk I have an RXD-628B (or RXD-6288?) card with a chip RXD 001 plus something lengthy. Dirt-cheap at eBay, and it works very well, with 75MB/s contiguous throughput just as the disks provides in Pata; access time in 0.2ms longer. Fine.

To connect a Pata ribbon on a Sata disk I had a Hxsp-071218 card which is bad. It blocked an otherwise sound Bios with safe sizes everywhere, or run at the Bios but not with Seatools, FDisk, or as a secondary disk on W2k... I don't use it any more.

My far better solution was a Sata host card on Pci. For W2k and later I have the excellent SiI3124. It has at least 119MB/s throughput on Intel Pci (not Via nor Ali!), does use Ahci (observed), accesses Dvd drives easily, has a Raid bios and a faster-to-boot non-Raid Bios, easy to change.

http://www.siliconimage.com/products/product.aspx?pid=27

http://www.siliconimage.com/products/product.aspx?pid=27

W2k boot time with one St3500418as was 24s (plus 4s added Bios time, or 2s non-Raid) on a PIII Tualatin 1.4GHz, as compared to 24s- with one J8160 on the original ICH2. Two St3500418as in Raid-0 aligned (!) "improved" to 22s (plus 4s added Bios time).

As this one has no driver for W95-98-Me, I have a SiI3114 for them. It has drivers for W98SE and WinMe (and W2k+), Bios for Raid and faster ones for non-Raid. I measured only 93MB/s with a disk capable of 134MB/s, and it doesn't use Ahci even with W2k, which loses a lot of speed, but is useless with W98-Me. And it does access Dvd drives, >128GiB and so on.

http://www.siliconimage.com/products/product.aspx?pid=28

http://www.siliconimage.com/support/searchresults.aspx?pid=28&cat=3

no single worry with both of them. Complete W2k installation from scratch tends to indicate this hardware is sound.

By the way, I had many SiI680a for Pata133 on Pci, they were excellent as well. All from eCreek.

And I didn't check how well the SiI3124 performs with WinMe and no driver. Under these conditions, the (Pata) RocketRaid 100 gave Udma speed to Win95b.

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I connected a 5200 rpm SATA drive to my notebook using the adapter I mentioned before and it's detected in BIOS although its size isn't reported correctly. I guess the BIOS can detect only up to 160 GB (the drive itself has 250 GB).

I'm still very happy that it works :) I still need to do some benchmarks and tests but I think the idea of putting an SSD into this laptop is not that far from reality as I initially thought.

Edited by tomasz86
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Are you sure you're using the latest BIOS offered by the manufacturer for your notebook? If not, consider upgrading.

It may be a way of detecting the full SSD.

At this moment it's not SSD, just normal 2.5' 250 GB SATA drive. I connected it in order to test the adapter whether it works or not. Capacity limit shouldn't be a problem in case of SSD because if I buy one, it'll be a small one (<=64GB).

This notebook (Samsung SENS Q10) was made around 2002 and there's been no BIOS updates released at all.

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