Comments

BrianStanding wrote on 12/4/2006, 2:07 PM
Most of the newer Intel chipsets no longer support ATA drives, so ATA support is now provided rather haphazardly by motherboard manufacturer using third-party solutions.

Unfortunately, very few of these third-party chipmakers seem to know how to build a decent ATA controller. After years of never having a disk failure, I've now had several disks fail in a few short months after using an onboard JMicron controller on my Asus mobo, and a Silicon Image PCI card. Absolute garbage!

My advice is to hunt around for a Promise Ultra-133 PCI controller and use that. Keep in mind PCI space is now limited in favor of PCI-E. Many motherboards ship with only 3, 2 or 1 PCI slots. A PCI ATA controller, a firewire card and an audio card will fill it up quickly.
Chienworks wrote on 12/4/2006, 3:26 PM
Considering cost issues, including the price of the PCI ATA card, the labor cost of setting it up and debugging it, and the horrendous cost of lost data should it fail, and compare that to the relatively low cost of new SATA drives ... for me it's a no brainer. Get new drives. Besides, your ATA drives are old and used and probably destined for failure sooner rather than later anyway.
ECB wrote on 12/5/2006, 11:33 AM
I suggest you consider the Promise TX2000, SX4000, or SX6000 depending on the number of ATA drives and the specs. With the TX2000 and same spec drives ou can build a fault tolerant RAID1 or 0+1. If you have more drives you can move to the SX4000 and build a RAID 5... SX6000 more yet. If the drives have the same specs except for size the Promise will build the array to the smaller size. If the drives are all different sizes and specs you can ise the SX4000 or SX6000 and configure as a JBOD (Just a Bunch Of Disks). YOU can also look at something like this.

HTH

Ed
Frenchy wrote on 12/5/2006, 3:07 PM
When I built my machine early in the year, I bought some SATA drives, but kept some of my IDE drives as well. Addonics (addonics.com) has some IDE to SATA converter cards (a small (about 3/4" tall by 3/8" deep by 2" wide) printed circuit card that attaches directly to the IDE connector or the HDD) that enables using an IDE drive on a SATA cable. If I remember, they run about $15-$20. I've had two on my machine since last february with no issues yet (knock knock).

Phil
RexA wrote on 12/5/2006, 10:41 PM
I was going to reply earlier, but I decided to wait for my new PC to arrive. I knew it was coming today. It only supports SATA internally. I ordered it with two SATA drives installed, but I may pull one and use it as an alternative boot configuration.

So tonight after I got the basics running, I connected one of my ATA drives in an external box with Firewire. Seems to work fine. I assume USB will work too.

Those external boxes with both 1394 and USB can be had really cheap. Might be a slight performance hit compared to plugging the drive internally, but I doubt it would be much, and you get the convience of being able to swap drives without opening the PC case.

Is some specific reason why you want to put an ATA into the box?

Paul_Holmes wrote on 12/6/2006, 7:42 AM
As many have suggested on this forum I archive my video on ATA hard-drives and connect them thru USB with USB hard drive enclosures. I assume that when I buy that new desktop in a few months (obviously a SATA) I'll have no problem connecting the old drives with USB.
JohnnyRoy wrote on 12/6/2006, 10:10 AM
I put my old ATA drives in firewire enclosures and use them externally. They work great.

~jr