Why would anyone want to use an SATA-IDE adapter?

[fuzzywuzzy]

I'm totally new to Serial ATA stuff, so if anyone has an informative tutorial on this stuff, that'd be great...

I've heard and seen of these SATA adapters... You also need a power adapter as well (Though some new WD have both a Molex and the SATA power adapter)...

Why would anyone that has a regular UDMA 66/UDMA 100 EIDE HD want to get the adapter?

How many perhipherals can you put on that one chain? Are there multiple SATA chains (like IDE channel 1, 2), or just one (like SCSI)?

Does it have the same issue with IDE channels, in that if you put a UDMA 33 thing, and a UDMA100 thing on the same channel, they both run at UDMA33?

I'm assuming most overclockers don't LIKE SATA? I read on Overclockers.com that the HDs are unstable when overclocked.

With the latest mobos that come wth IDE RAID, etc, would one be able to not enable RAID, but somehow have 4 IDE channels, with 1 HD per channel? (i.e. what happens if you have 4 HDs, and you want them on separate channels)

[cherryp00t]

1 adaptor for 1 harddrive.. and amost nforce 2 boards dont have onboard IDE Raid but have onboard SATA raid.. so with 2 IDE-SATA converters you can Raid your IDE harddrives wihtout buying a Raid card

[BowerR64]

and that would free up another IDE channel. You could run more drives, or a DVD burner or what ever. The cables are also thinner helping your airflow threw your case.

[ola]

I have a Seagate Barracuda 7200.7 ATA with a SATA adapter. Two simple reasons:
The real SATA drives costed an arm and a leg at the time I bought the drive. Today, I would have bought a SATA drive.
SATA cables are nice and thin.

The adapter was included with the mobo and I don't think I would have bought one separately. I just plugged it in because I had it and haven't had a reason to change back to regaular ATA.

Note: If you're using WinXP - update the SATA driver. The original driver caused data corruption but with the new driver, I haven't had a single problem with that.

/O

[BowerR64]

update the board sata driver like from abit? or from microsoft?

[ola]

I think I got the new driver from here (http://www.abit.com.tw/page/en/download/download_detail.php?pFILE_TYPE=Driver&pMAIN_TYPE=Motherboard&pTITLE_ON_SCREEN=NF7-SV2.0&pSOCKET_TYPE=Socket+A)

I don't remember where I read about data corruption with WinXP and S-ATA but since I updated the driver, my computer hasn't complained about it. I used to get these "your drive needs to be checked for consitency" error messages when booting befor the update.

I upgraded the driver in Windows but you can of course also use that driver during installation.

[JKeefe]

Originally posted by fuzzywuzzy
I'm assuming most overclockers don't LIKE SATA? I read on Overclockers.com that the HDs are unstable when overclocked.
This was an article Ed wrote over the summer about OCing his SATA drives. He eventually figured out how to do it and keep it stable, but it didn't help performance any.

I gather Ed was messing with his PCI/AGP dividers. Most people just fix them at 33/66 and go on their merry way, so SATA HDDs are just as overclocker-friendly as IDE drives - they pose the same problem that any other device on those buses do, and they are easily taken care of by locking the PCI/AGP frequency.