SATA HDD's on IDE motherboard??

S

sjt

New Member
Hi, not sure if I've got this all right but.... I want to turn an old pc into a home server the only thing I need is HDD's, but the old mother board only has sockets for IDE's.
I have found some converters on the net but am not sure what is best/fastest to support a SATA drive, they are
1. an sort of inline convert from the IDE socket with separate power supply or 2. a PCI card type that has several SATA outputs.
So, will the inline type (lots cheaper) be sufficient or will it restrict the drive to IDE type drive speeds. Hope that makes some sense.

Thanks for any help,

Steve
 
sjt said:
Hi, not sure if I've got this all right but.... I want to turn an old pc into a home server the only thing I need is HDD's, but the old mother board only has sockets for IDE's.
I have found some converters on the net but am not sure what is best/fastest to support a SATA drive, they are
1. an sort of inline convert from the IDE socket with separate power supply or 2. a PCI card type that has several SATA outputs.
So, will the inline type (lots cheaper) be sufficient or will it restrict the drive to IDE type drive speeds. Hope that makes some sense.

Thanks for any help,

Steve
Click to expand...

The internal adapter would probably be the way to go for both speed and economy. The other option like you said would require you to have the HDD outside of the case. The speeds probably should be right on. By any chance you could also buy a cheap IDE drive to throw in there.
 
Thanks for your replies, I have had a look for IDE HDDs but they seem to be almost twice the $/MB, I also can't find any which are 1-2TB.
Have also found PCI card converters which can be used for internal sata HDDs, so not sure if they will be any faster than the inline converters.

Cheers,

Steve
 
sjt said:
Thanks for your replies, I have had a look for IDE HDDs but they seem to be almost twice the $/MB, I also can't find any which are 1-2TB.
Have also found PCI card converters which can be used for internal sata HDDs, so not sure if they will be any faster than the inline converters.

Cheers,

Steve
Click to expand...

Yes, the higher capacity drives are all SATA. IDE is dying out.

The PCI card will be faster than the inline converter. A full SATA II bus will support up to 3.0Gb/s. IDE maxes out at around 1Gb/s. That being said, you may not notice an actual speed difference compared with single drive on the inline adapter. You may notice a difference with multiple drives on the IDE bus. Generally speaking, the SATA controller card will be your best option if not just for drive capacity.
 
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