IDE<->SATA Adapters: safe to use, or corrupt your data?

[starhawk]

Recently did a rebuild of a system -- mostly the case, guts are largely the same -- because of, oddly enough, hard drive failure. Of course it's my mother's setup... she's not exactly a tech genius (well, neither am I but I'm well ahead of her, by mutual agreement) so I want to make sure that there's a bare minimum of trouble from the newish box.

One of the features of the new case, and in fact the only new part of the guts, is a 40gig IDE HDD. I have somehow managed to acquire a baker's dozen of the damned things. (Desktop style, and therefore nearly worthless, or I'd be hitting FS/T right about now.) The upshot is that when one dies, I can stick another in fairly quickly since I have them on hand. One slight problem: the motherboard is of course SATA-only (it's a D525MW, purchased retail, if anyone cares).

However, a few weeks ago, a friend and fellow [H]er (you know who you are!) sent me some stuff, including an IDE<->SATA adapter/converter doohickey that looks a bit like this -- http://www.ebay.com/itm/201042286228 -- except that mine is yellow and has a sticker on it telling you what it is, in that typical serif font that screams "made in China"

That adapter is now between the HDD and the motherboard... and as soon as I stuff it in there, I remember hearing a long time ago about how those things can corrupt your data. OTOH, my father has one in his computer for an old IDE HDD that gets occasional use, and he claims he's never had trouble with it. I've never used them before myself.

Has anyone had trouble with those adapters? Are they bad news? Are they just fine? Somewhere in between? In short: can I trust the thing or not?

 

[teh_chem]

I've used one very similar to that eBay listing, and I've also had problems. When copying data from a drive on that adapter, the transfers would fail mid-copy. Sometimes explorer would not recognize the drive, with a prompt to format (no thank you!).

I don't know why it didn't work reliably, whether it's cheap components or a buggy circuit.

I threw mine away.

 

[timta2]

i would get rid of the adapters and PATA drives. A modern cheap SATA drive will outperform those drives significantly and will also likely be far more reliable.

 

[starhawk]

Junked the adapter after a local friend told me that they basically don't work.

Went instead with a spare Promise PCI card that he had given me... it's a bootable RAID card. Dunno crap about RAID (because I've never needed to ) but the card's purpose is to enable booting an IDE drive from a motherboard that otherwise does not support such.

There are two points to using the IDE drives.

(1) I have a lot of them (13x40gig, 5x60gig, and a pile of smaller stuff) and can replace them for free for quite some time.

(2) Money is very very tight right now. Like, "$12ish for a SATA 40gig drive on eBay is something I can't afford right now" tight. What can happen for free, happens. What can't, doesn't.

Performance isn't really an issue here, BTW... the machine will run Chrome on WinXP so that Mom can watch streaming videos online. Once both OS and browser are running, the HDD doesn't have much to do Why XP? Because that's what Mom is used to and doesn't want to switch away from. It works... it's not a supercomputer or anything that she'll be running, anyways. D525 Intel board, 4gig RAM (well, 3.25gig addressable) and not a whole lot else. Power supply is an "Allied" brand SFX12V job that almost certainly came with an "Apex" brand case. (Given that the logos for both are basically the names in the same weird thin font that's the same teal color... yeah, they're probably the same company.) IIRC it's a 200w supply, which is easily five times the needs of the system...

Oh, and those guts (with the exception of hard drives past) have actually been doing their job quite nicely for a goodly while now... believe it or not, you really don't need a half terabyte of RAM and a pair of eight-core, five gigahertz CPUs, complete with cooling towers next door, just to livestream MSNBC every evening... (I exaggerate to make a point.)