Paralel to Serial ATA adapter, is there such a thing ?

[Admiral]

Can't say that I was (interested) thinking at the possibility of connecting a paralel ATA hdd, was more interested at connecting a CDROM/CDRW to the SATA controller and getting rid of the ribbon/rounded cables forever.

(just for my personal knowledge, don't own a SATA mobo or hdd... yet)

[Nowhere]

yes, there is

but I don't know if it's compatible with ATAPI also.

btw, I'm also thinking of connecting some old hdd this way. For one reason: hot swap of serial ata.

[Paulr]

I have a P4G8X motherboard with onboad Silicon Image SATA controllers.
Attached to these controllers via an ASUS converter I have a WD1200JB HD attached.
Benchmarks show no drop in performance due to this conversion and it means my two regular IDE channels can have the DVD-ROM & CD-RW on one channel each.

In theory current SATA controllers should be able to control any IDE device and that includes CD-ROM etc.
I'm ordering some bits & pieces tomorrow and I may well order myself another converter and give it a try, see what happens when I attach my Pioneer DVD-ROM to the other SATA channel.

[Nowhere]

Paulr, do you know exactly if the hot swap feature is present there if using s-ata adapter with some old ide drive?

[Paulr]

Let me do a little research on that - I cannot see why not.
If I was to unplug the IDE-SATA converter whilst the machine was on it should work - the controller will still see the seperately powered converter, so is bacially treating the WD HD as a SATA device.
If I hadn't just finished rebuilding my machine last weekend with lots of new shiney bits I'd give it a try and see what happens!

I'll see what I can find out.

[Kurt]

Originally posted by Nowhere
Paulr, do you know exactly if the hot swap feature is present there if using s-ata adapter with some old ide drive?

yes, it's "present".

The hot-swap capability is provided by a slight difference in the length of the pins. When one wire/pin is disconnected but the other is not, the system interprets this as "ongoing disconnection". When they're both connected or disconnected, the device is *surprise* connected or disconnected. That's hot-swap for you

Hence it will work with anything IDE living on the SATA-IDE adapter. Note that it doesn't mean every device will like it...

[Nowhere]

the 7 year old 800 mb wd drive of my buddy will. It even "likes it" when doing this with paraller ata. But I'm afraid about my mothorboard ;P

[Kurt]

no problem with the mobo. it should be "protected" by the SATA-IDE adapter.

[Paulr]

Just a little follow up to all this.
I e-mailed Silicon Image last week with regards to the hot-swap ability if using a standard IDE HD on a SATA controller via a converter.
The SATA controller I'm using is the Silicon Image 3112A.
The reply from them was as follows:

If you use a SATA-IDE bridge converter, you will have the same hot plug capability as you would with a native SATA drive. However, you may not be able to achieve the full bandwidth of SATA with an older IDE drive

For anybody interested I also asked about attaching CD-ROM, DVD, CDRW etc via a converter to the SATA controllers.
The reply I got was:

If you use a SATA-IDE bridge using our SiI3611 chip, you will be able to connect to our SiI3112A since the 3611 has ATAPI support. Not all SATA-IDE bridges have ATAPI support. If it does not have ATAPI support, the bridge will not work with CDROMs, DVD drives, etc.

So what is being said here is it is all down to the bridge/converter as to if you can use CD products on the SATA controller.
As long as the converter/bridge supports it then the SATA controller itself does.

[Admiral]

For anybody interested I also asked about attaching CD-ROM, DVD, CDRW etc via a converter to the SATA controllers.
The reply I got was:

If you use a SATA-IDE bridge using our SiI3611 chip, you will be able to connect to our SiI3112A since the 3611 has ATAPI support. Not all SATA-IDE bridges have ATAPI support. If it does not have ATAPI support, the bridge will not work with CDROMs, DVD drives, etc.

So what is being said here is it is all down to the bridge/converter as to if you can use CD products on the SATA controller.
As long as the converter/bridge supports it then the SATA controller itself does.

Thanks for the CDRW info
I plan on getting the ECS L7S7A (SIS 746FX) as my next motherboard, since the MSI and Iwill versions don't have SATA.
And it has a Sil3112A controller.