Syba SY-BIR-IDESA IDE/SATA Converter Bi-Directional IDE to SATA
by Syba
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Category: CE
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Digital Photo Product Details
Manufacturer: SybaAudio: English (Original Language)
Model: SY-BIR-IDESA
Product features:
- Sold Individually
Digital Cameras Photo Reviews of Syba SY-BIR-IDESA IDE/SATA Converter Bi-Directional IDE to SATA
Customer Review: Works well, price is excellent. SpinRite trick for SATA drives.
Summary: 5 Stars
So your old PATA (IDE) drives are starting to fail, as is happening to me. What to do? Replace with another IDE drive?
You can hardly find new IDE drives anymore. If you can, they're more expensive than a 1 TB SATA, don't have as much cache, don't have the raw speed from perpendicular recording, etc. PATA doesn't seem the way to go for future expansion. No, a new SATA drive is the way to go, but your old motherboard never heard of SATA. How to make them talk to each other...
The solution? This converter! As a bonus, unlike a SATA PCI expansion card, this needs no drivers and is bi-directional. So you can run your old IDE drives into the SATA ports on a newer motherboard whose single IDE channel is being used already by your DVD burners. Might be useful someday for transferring / cloning from an old drive to new.
As a bonus, if you run SpinRite to maintain your SATA drives ([...]), you know that SpinRite is somewhat SATA challenged. It can't see SMART info thru SATA and takes forever to run the drive using PIO. But if you plug your SATA drive into the IDE port using this converter, voilà, SpinRite sees the SMART data and runs faster!
I've noticed there are other bi-directional converters out there. This one is nice for its low profile. Some of the others stick out perpendicular to the IDE connector and I'm not sure they'd fit a typical case.
Only ten bucks. Keep it in your bag of tricks for working on others' computers.
I had no problems with mine. The instructions are a bit thin, but basically, plug it in to an IDE slot on your mobo (the slide switch will already be set from the factory for this), plug in the provided Y-power connector (red LED on) and plug the supplied SATA cable into your drive. Of course, you'll loose the dual channel capability of your IDE port. But that's to be expected with SATA signaling.
It's only SATA 1 compliant, probably a limitation of the IDE port itself. But I haven't seen a SATA II drive yet that can burst beyond 150 GB/sec anyway. Nor would it matter in practice. Some people say on NewEgg reviews that if you have a SATA I/II jumper on your drive, you have to set it to I for this converter. The drive I'm using now is SATA II, but has no such jumper. So I can't say.
I haven't tried this backward yet, going from an IDE drive to SATA. Same procedure, except change the slide switch position.
I plan to do some benchmarking soon... the mobo I'm using now supported only very early SATA I and I suspect my new WD Caviar Black SATA drive will be faster using IDE UDMA 6 than crippled native SATA 1. I'll try to comment on that when I have the data.
I haven't tried it on CD/DVD burner. Don't know that I will.
For $10, how can you go wrong?
Description of Syba SY-BIR-IDESA IDE/SATA Converter Bi-Directional IDE to SATA
SYBA SATA/IDE 2WAY Converter JMDigital Cameras & Photo Categories
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