ide to sata converter

newguy5

newguy5

New Member
i have an ide hard drive that i want to use for my new computer that i will run off of the one ide drive on the mobo i'm getting. but for my two cd and dvd drives, i need a converter. my question is whether or not the converter slows down the processing of the drives, and also what is a good one to get? i am looking on newegg but most of them have terrible ratings, so i'm a little confused as to whether or not there is an adaptor that will do the job without sacrificing performance.
 
An addon controller card is put on the pci bus which is separate from the ide or sata controllers altogether. Generally an addon controller card is for ide RAID or sata type drive arrays where some loss is to be expected while not great.

With everything trending towards sata you may want to consider replacing one of the cd drives for a sata dvd burner that will cover everything. newegg has those for $28 upto $35 depending on brand. http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produ...E&N=2010100005+1036506653+1037127054&name=20X

When moving drives from a build with two ide channels into the new build here with only one channel I went with a sata dvd burner and left one of the pair of ide drives behind from the old case. That allowed for two optical drives along the ide drive plus running two more sata hard drives.

There's no middle man as the term goes inbetween. Each of the 5 drives run direct on the bus they were intended. Since you are planning to spend money the thought there would be applying that towards something you can take with you on the build that comes later after this one.
 
yeah i didn't realize the dvd burners were so cheap, AND with a 48x regular write, it looks like i could buy one of those drives and use it for all cd-rom or dvd media. the problem with my current setup is that my dvd rom is very slow on the cd read end...well not very slow, but like 24x which isn't really sufficient these days. it would make sense to get a SATA dvd burner and use the IDE for my hard drive. then again i could probably sell the IDE HD and buy a SATA hard drive with twice the space and just have an all-SATA system.
 
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so i did a cd rom drive speed test on both of my drives. anyway, the one that says 52x read in 34x after a one minute test (but was still climbing). the dvd rom (since i have no idea what it is) did 26x in the same time, and was climbing, just slower.

what speed do you think the dvd rom drive actually is and do you think it would be sufficient for every day use in a new computer? i would be playing some games that require a cd in, just making sure the disk drive would not be what's slowing any of the games down.

the reason i ask is because i may just use my current dvd drive and my ide hard drive on just the single ide port. you can do that, right, hook up ONE ide cable with the HD being the primary and the dvd drive being the slave? that won't create performance or other conflicts, will it? that might be my best bet if the dvd drive is not that slow.
 
that won't create performance or other conflicts, will it?
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It will if both are in use at the same time. Only 1 PATA device on a given channel can talk at a time. So if you are copying from the DVD drive to the hard drive it will be slower than if they were on seperate channels. You can still do it, performance hits should be rare for the average home user.
 
I've run the systems here both ways and never see any great drops unless you are moving some large volumes of files or simply large files like 13gb video files. Then you will see a slowdown due to hardware limitation on either ide or sata. When they come out with a 1tb 10,000rpm WD Raptor model let me know. I could use the faster drive speed there. :P
 
When planning out the new build here I already faced a dilemna with two ide hard drives and two ide optical drives going into a case seeing a board with only one ide channel. Since I was upgrading a family member's old Socket A build I put together new a few years back the old 939 build was in a case that allows upgrading at a later date.

The optical were one 52x24x52 cd writer and a 16x dvd burner. Those were simply left in the old case with one of the two ide HDs to solve a problem there. I then ordered a new 18x sata dvd burner while there are now 20x models seen for the faster 12x dvd ram capability now seen on the new models. One more ide drive solved.

That left one brand ide 52x32x52 cd writer and one of the two ide HDs to install. The move of the pair of 500gb WD sata HDs were as they say "easy as pie" since the new board has 6 sata ports. If I ever found a need for a 3rd optical drive that would sata as well. For speed there a 12x or 14x dvd burner would be slow while 16x is still average.
 
i rarely burn dvds, so i wasn't referring to that. i was talking about the cd-rom read of the drive. does that speed after 1 minute sound like it's at least a 42x-48x cdrom drive and will provide a performance issue when i'm playing games that require a cd be in the drive while playing?
 
I run games like Fear or Prey which require a disk in the optical drive in order to run those games in both cd and dvd drives without a difference noticed. While one drive is 48x and another is 52x those are max speeds not the actual read speed from a game disk.

You'll notice a difference when trying disks you burn on different drives however at times or when going to install softwares off of game cds where the dvd drive then seems a little slower. This is due the types of reading lens that generally read off disks with the higher compression of data in the dvd format.
 
PC eye said:
I run games like Fear or Prey which require a disk in the optical drive in order to run those games in both cd and dvd drives without a difference noticed. While one drive is 48x and another is 52x those are max speeds not the actual read speed from a game disk.

You'll notice a difference when trying disks you burn on different drives however at times or when going to install softwares off of game cds where the dvd drive then seems a little slower. This is due the types of reading lens that generally read off disks with the higher compression of data in the dvd format.
Click to expand...

what do you mean a disk in the optical drive? but pretty much if i am running games through the dvd/cdrom drive it shouldn't slow it down, that's what you were saying?
 
When a drive speed is listed as 52x or 48x for the reading speed that's the fastest it can read at. Drives don't run at max all the time. Most gaming disks take into account drives with slower speeds like 32x or some off figure as the minimum needed. As long as the drive is above the minimum why should you see any lags there?

You don't in general. But some find that slaving the optical to a hard drive on the primary ide channel sees lags there over having it mastered on the secondary channel. Read times for media you burn on the other hand has to do with how the drive used for burning will read it's own burns better then others at time.

That has more to do with the make and model drive and media used. One example was going to read a data dvd burned on the last build with an ide dvd burner and reading it one the new build with a sata model. Both are Sony models but one made by Lite-On while the new one is Nec. Both simply see the Sony name while being a little fussy about the media for some reason.
 
i see what you are saying. the speed isn't the problem, but having one ide cord and slaving the cd/dvd drive COULD slow the system down a little...
 
On the new build here the one ide cd writer is slaved to the one ide hard drive with Vista on that. I run an old game cd in that drive in both XP on the first sata and Vista without really noticing any lags due to the way the drive is setup. Drivers for the new video and sound cards have been far more of a concern in both versions.
 
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