Been thinking of using these converters on my IDE hard drives so they are 'SATA compliant'. I see that it will be using both the SATA type power connector and also a 4 pin (floppy drive type) connector. Have anyone used these IDE to SATA adapters before? Are both power cables required in order to make a drive operational? I will also be getting a SATA PCMCIA card for my laptop and that's where this will play a important role. I have no idea how to give it power if I want to use it as an external...what kind of cable to get for external use (4 pin connector)?

A quick question on those y power cables. Will this supply enough power for the drives inside a computer? For example, I see one of those cables where they have one male 4 pin power cable that splits up to two SATA power cables. Just wondering if this will provide enough power for double the drive since it's really connected using one 4 pin cable from the power supply.

Just an update. I saw some y cables for the 4 pin (floppy drive) power connectors. It's going to be a bit clogged up with the extra cables, but it should work. Will test it when I get all the remaining parts and see how it goes.

Eh it really shouldn't matter much IMO.

OK, just got all the parts in yesterday and didn't like it as much as I have anticipated. First thing to say is that one power connector will definitely not be enough power for the two hard drives...should have known that earlier. So I had to use two AC adapters for the two external drives with the y cables. Both of my IDE hard drives are converted to SATA type connectors.

I thought the PCMCIA SATA card should have it's own dedicated bus for the two ports there, but it seems like they are still 'sharing' the throughput as I can't transfer files simultaneously without things slowing down.

I haven't noticed much transfer speed increase either. Guess it's almost time to move on to SATA II and test that out

okay, time to wake up. Using a PATA > SATA connector will NOT give you any speed increase. It's not because you use a serial port > USB2.0 (if that might exist) convertor, that you'll be able to transfer data at 480Mbs over a serial port .
Also, do not forget that SATA does not even offer a speed increase on drives sold nowadays. A good HDD transfer at MAX 70Mbs, wich is still below IDE100 or IDE133, so don't even think that SATA or SATA2.0 will give a speed increase.

About the power cable, it has to give enough power, it's connected to your PSU, even the cheapest ones can power lots of hard drives without a problem.

Yeah, figured that was the reason why it wasn't as fast. I guess it just makes the PATA drives work on SATA only motherboards...

But I have found that SATA is indeed much faster than the old IDE connections. I noticed this when I installed it into my desktop (instead of using it as an external drive) and installed Windows XP on it. It literally took only 20 minutes to install Windows XP on that SATA drive. This is using an actual SATA drive without any adapters/dongles/converters.

The reason the power cable didn't give enough juice was because it was just a wall adapter one. You know, the ones that come with those IDE-USB Adapter cables I bought a few of those 2 in 1 four pin power cables/splitters and split them up like 2 times. Couldn't use more than one hard drive at the same time. I'm sure a low voltage power supply can handle this with no problems.

How about the "dedicated" data line? Doesn't this apply to SATA? I thought that it can send and receive data at the same time without slowing things down? I know now that the converter won't make them the same speed, but would it actually SLOW transfer rates down on both ends if I connected this "SATA" drive to an actual SATA made hard drive on my SATA PC Card? How about the SATA PC Card itself? It's plugged into my laptop. Does it have SATA speeds if I just connect a original SATA hard drive to it?

Thanks.

Actually i think the most important thing that determine the speed to the hard disk itself. Lately just bought a new Maxtor 80GB SATA2 8MB Cache drive, and i use it on my sempron 2600+ system. I find it quite fast. But later i got some problem with it, a bit of conflict with the mother board, and some trouble of booting up. So, I exchange with my friend for his Samsung one, same specs. It was working find. But then i realize i need more space, so i go back and change it to a 160GB Hitachi 8MB IDE. I took the ide one is to prevent having the same problem i had witj the maxtor. before i did the swap, i did some benchmark on the old drive. After i change to the new Hitachi drive, i did the same benchmark again using HD Tach. Here is the result

Hitachi:
Sequential Read Speed = 80MB/s
Burst Speed = 124MB/s
Average Read = 64MB/s
CPU Ultilization = 5%

Samsung:
Sequential Read Speed = 620MB/s
Burst Speed = 190MB/s
Average Read = 50MB/s
CPU Ultilization = 14%

From the result, it seems that IDE is performing better that SATA except for Burst Speed. Burst speed is the raw bus speed. Which is how fast your hdd controller talks to the controller board on the hard disk. but if your hard disk can only supply data at a lower rate, that Burst speed is useless, except for if you're reading from the 8MB cache. Today's data on the hard disk are all quite big, in the order gig. 8MB cache is useless, so is the Burst Speed. the other thing is the CPU ultilization. Seems that IDE controller is quite optimized, where as SATA still need some improvement over it.

As a conclusion, don't be cheated by the fact that SATA is faster, but take note of the speed of the drive itself.

For the "dedicated" data line part, I think it has something to do with the fact that you're using a PCMCIA SATA card. It's not that I'm saying PCMCIA is slow (in fact, it should be as fast as a normal PCI-bus), but I think (I guess) that PCMCIA isn't Full Duplex. This means it can't send and receive data at the very same moment, but it first has to send, then receive, send, receive ... wich causes things to slow down.

Hmm....one more question that's been bothering me. I know now that using these converters will not make them run at SATA speeds, but what speed will they be running in if I'm using it via the PCMCIA SATA card? I find it MUCH slower than my other hard drives which I use with a IDE to USB 2.0 adapter.