Possible SATA drive?

[Nick]

I got an Abit NF7-S last weekend and its all running lovely, but there's this dongle thing in the box which has been nagging at me to try it out.

From what I can see, its a converter to turn a normal IDE drive into a SATA one.

Its a bit of black plastic which plugs into the back of an IDE drive and then you've got two sockets on the back for power and for the SATA cable.

Am I right in thinking this is to convert an IDE drive to SATA or is it so you can use an IDE drive with an existing SATA array?

If it is for converting a drive to SATA, is there any advantage in doing so or should I just wait until I have to get a new drive and then upgrade to SATA?

[Oo_Scotty_oO]

Not really worth it m8 , you wont see any performace increase using this on your sata ports , also there are issues with HDD compatability using the adaptor , I for one could never get it work tried & 3 diffrent HDD's , it works on my mates system though . Strange ....

[nichomach]

Deck, that's exactly what it's for, but as far as using it goes, I concur with Oo_Scotty_oO - I tried it with my Maxtor DM+60 30GB drive, and it would work, but not reliably. I bunged in an 80GB DM+9 SATA instead.

[schrickvr6]

if it says serrilel2 on the adaptor you can use these with optical drives as well

[Nick]

Yeah, its Serriel or some funny spelling of it, which I guess is the name of the manufacturer, says on the little bit of paper with it that it can be used with opti drives... just wasn't sure if it was to add on to existing SATA array.

So is SATA worth it then? (obviously not using this dongle thingy, but in the future when I upgrade, is it worth switching to?)

[[GSV]Trig]

I've found copying files over SATA is loads faster, I'm talking 700Mb files in about 10 seconds from a SATA drive to an IDE drive using the convertor, its faster than IDE to IDE simple as...

[subucni]

this should help you out if you have any questions about it

http://www.abit-usa.com/technology/serillel_new.php

[Steve]

SATA uses less CPU - but performance wise the drives are not really any different yet.

[TiG]

Deckard,

Got two on my intel system running two 133 pata drives as sata, in stripe, reliable as anything been running them in this setup for over a year now and CPU utilisation is vastly reduced.

I'd recommend them myself

TiG

[Proplus]

I have 2 of these Asus IDE to SATA dongles, and I've ever only gotten one IDE HDD to work with it. Performance wise, its the same as if I used the drive as IDE. But I do get to use the SATA ribbon cables which makes my cases a little more tidier!