I made an adaptor to use Destop 3.5" HD on a notebook IDE socket

[nuassembly]

I made a male to male PCB adaptor for connecting a 3.5" HD to regular notebook IDE socket. I tested on Sunday and found out that you could use 2 pcs of hard drives (3.5" or 2.5", one slave and one master) on your notebook.

Note that this is different from regular converter that lets you use 2.5" harddrive on the standard 3 connector IDE cable.
This converter gives several DIY options:
1. It gives one the option to run their NB on faster and larger 3.5" HD if needed, e.g. video editing
--- defeat the major bottleneck for NB
2. It gives a faster way to do complete imaging backup using GHOST or other image copying software

Here is the web page I set up for this item:
http://www.nuassembly.com/35TONBIDE/DIDENB.htm

 

[AMDflux]

very cool, but u can also buy a usb2.0 external HD

 

[nuassembly]

very cool, but u can also buy a usb2.0 external HD

Yes, USB2.0 works too but at much slower speed --- compared to ATA100 on notebook. To create a GHOST image of 15GB, it took USB2.0 3 hours, while for ATA100 it only takes 15minutes.

 

[Xaotic]

Welcome to the forums!

There are commercial cards that do this as well. I use several extenders that allow pin connections for doing Oscope traces of the waveforms. This will work for most laptops, but there are some models that have a single IDE controller. These models will have the HDD as master and the optical drive as slave.

 

[nuassembly]

Welcome to the forums!

There are commercial cards that do this as well. I use several extenders that allow pin connections for doing Oscope traces of the waveforms. This will work for most laptops, but there are some models that have a single IDE controller. These models will have the HDD as master and the optical drive as slave.

Mmm, could you give me a link to the commercial card source?

Also, the latest SONOMA notebooks only carry one PATA, does this kind of notebook share the only PATA between the CD/DVD and the PATA IDE HD? That will slow things down.

 

[AMDflux]

Yes, USB2.0 works too but at much slower speed --- compared to ATA100 on notebook. To create a GHOST image of 15GB, it took USB2.0 3 hours, while for ATA100 it only takes 15minutes.

well never said anything about speed...but good point.

 

[nuassembly]

I noticed that the SONOMA notebooks and all 915 chipset uses ICH6, which only has one PATA.
Actually, major vendors all introduced SONOMA notebooks, and looks like that they all use the same PATA HD and DVD, has anyone checked if they slow things down when working at the same time.

 

[Cjwinnit]

Nice one..

 

[redwraith94]

Good job, and to the forums!

 

[nuassembly]

thanks for the compliments!

Looks like that if HD and CD/DVD share the same PATA, then the CDRW/DVDRW process could be quite slow

 

[Xaotic]

I'll check the cards when I get back to work on Tuesday. They were obtained about 4 years ago and I'll need to determine the manufacturer from the PCBA.

 

[FTC]

Yes, USB2.0 works too but at much slower speed --- compared to ATA100 on notebook. To create a GHOST image of 15GB, it took USB2.0 3 hours, while for ATA100 it only takes 15minutes.

Hi,

That is not necessarily so. I routinely make image backup of my desktop and laptop drives w/USB2 at very reasonable speeds... it takes 30 min. to backup an almost full 60 GB drive IF you're really using USB2 (not USB2 used in USB1 compatibility mode) AND have a good host controller (Intel ICHx or NEC).

 

[nuassembly]

Hi,

That is not necessarily so. I routinely make image backup of my desktop and laptop drives w/USB2 at very reasonable speeds... it takes 30 min. to backup an almost full 60 GB drive IF you're really using USB2 (not USB2 used in USB1 compatibility mode) AND have a good host controller (Intel ICHx or NEC).

60GB IN 30 minutes sounds too fast --
I did a test with a single file copy from and to USB in USB2.0 ports, and found that it takes at least 1 minute to write 1.17GB to USB.
http://www.nuassembly.com/USBHD/HardfactsUSB20.htm

The above results are done under Windows XP, and if GHOST use USB2.0 (under DOS?) to create image, it is much slower (due to memory usage??).

 

[FTC]

60GB IN 30 minutes sounds too fast --

Well, as I said it is an *almost full* 60GB disk, so it's really like 53 or so used GBs that get copied, AND the image gets on-the-fly compressed to almost 50%, so really the ghosted image is about 30GB big, so if you make numbers, it ends up being a transfer rate of about 15MB/second, which is *absolutely* reachable in most USB2 implementations with an average (1.5Ghz or more) CPU. To clarify it further, I do not use GHOST to make the image, but Drive Snapshot, so do not really need to do it from DOS.

 

[nuassembly]

Well, as I said it is an *almost full* 60GB disk, so it's really like 53 or so used GBs that get copied, AND the image gets on-the-fly compressed to almost 50%, so really the ghosted image is about 30GB big, so if you make numbers, it ends up being a transfer rate of about 15MB/second, which is *absolutely* reachable in most USB2 implementations with an average (1.5Ghz or more) CPU. To clarify it further, I do not use GHOST to make the image, but Drive Snapshot, so do not really need to do it from DOS.

Thanks for the note and the link --- sounds like exactly what I have been looking for to replace GHOST --- only runs on the GHOST DOS mode.

I did a test yesterday, copying file from the 2.5" HD to my 3.5" HD which is on the same PATA line. It records about 2.33GB in 2minutes and 10", so the speed is about 18MB/sec for shared PATA. It is quite close to USB2.0 under XP indeed.

 

[veryhumid]

really nice work! it might be a good idea to take another picture of it at a different angle. It's hard to figure out what is what from that shot.

 

[nuassembly]

really nice work! it might be a good idea to take another picture of it at a different angle. It's hard to figure out what is what from that shot.

Here is the picture of the connector after mounting an adaptor from the notebook computer that is removed from the original 2.5" notebook harddrive
(blue one still in the original caddy)

Here is another picture zoomed out from the same angle.

 

[nuassembly]

My colleague bought a SONOMA notebook and it actually uses 2 PATA device
1. HD: TOSHIBA MK8025GAS
2. DVD+-RW: NEC ND-6500A
So, the new notebook's PATA devices should actually have slower speed than the legacy 855 chipset Notebooks

I have found on google that for the same harddrive, the test scores using 915 chipset are about 10% to 15% lower than using 855 chipset.