How to use an old PATA hard disk drive on the newer SATA-only computer

hard drivepatasata

I've got some old hard drives I'd like to connect to my new computer to quickly transfer gigs and gigs of data from the old drives to my nice large new drives. The old drives are PATA/IDE/ATA and the new computer's motherboard only supports SATA drives.

I found this PCI IDE raid controller card. Will this work? How do I power the old drives. My power supply has only new-style connectors.

I want to do a one-time dump of miscellaneous data (mp3s, DVD images, MAME roms, photos, videos, documents, etc.) off of 5-or-6 smaller, older PATA drives onto my newer, larger SATA drives. I've been unable to "retire" two old computers because I've never gotten around to this housekeeping task. Now I want to get rid of the clutter.

I'd rather avoid the USB solutions. I've got a lot of data to transfer and I want it to go as quickly as possible.

The DVD drive is SATA–not PATA. It's a Dell computer, they don't seem to give away a single extra port on their motherboards. I'm surprised it came with even a free PCI slot.

I've asked: How much slower is USB than SATA or PATA for HDD?

I don't know a power supply model number or anything. It came with a cheap Dell computer. There are no molex power connectors because the computer came with no such drives. The DVD drive is SATA.

I've found adapters, but they go the wrong way: old power supply to new drive.

molex 4pin male to 15pin SATA power cable

This was for a one-time bulk file copy to retire/repurpose the old disk drives and I'm now done. But, I would be interested to know if anyone found such an adapter.

Best Answer

I ended up Frankensteining two computers together. I put a PCI PATA card in the new machine for the data connection and got power from a different computer. Ugly.

PATA drive in a SATA computer

Related Solutions

IDE/PATA high-speed hard drive dock

Here's a 3.5" IDE to 3.5" SATA docking adapter that could be part of the solution. Weird. I figured that would be the impossible part.

I was hoping to find something like this 2.5" to 3.5" SATA chassis that would take a 44-pin IDE drive internally.

FWIW, the best I could come up with at this time for a 2.5" to 3.5" PATA converter which the 2.5" drive could be mounted to is this.

Perhaps it would be possible to kludge something together using the 3.5" IDE to 3.5" SATA docking adapter you found?

There is also this smaller 2.5" to 3.5" converter which might be of use if you wanted to fabricate your own drive attachment scheme.

Can I plug a single hard drive into the “SATA RAID1” socket

With current Intel chipsets that have included RAID, I normally expect drives to be in AHCI mode even with RAID enabled until the drive is manually added to a RAID volume. I'm not certain how your motherboard/controller manages it.

In the event that it actually won't let you use a drive on a 'RAID' port as a normal AHCI drive, you should try installing the SATA drivers provided by ASUS here. It could be a 'FakeRaid' port, which would require the OS to have the appropriate drivers before RAID works.

And yes, single drive RAID is possible. Not normally done, since it provides absolutely no advantages over AHCI, but if your motherboard demands drives on that port to be in a RAID array, it is possible.

Possibly relevant is this:

He wanted to install an OS on the RAID drive.

Advice given:

So I do see a Marvell module. It is possible you would need to configure a single disk as a "stripe of one disk" or something similar, then do an F6 install of a RAID driver, to get it to work.

Now, when I look in the e2736 M2V user manual, it says:

"Do not install the operating system with the device connected to the Marvell® 88SE6121 Serial ATA connector."

So that is not an encouraging sign. It implies Asus doesn't think it will work.

As Bill said, give it a try, but there are no guarantees it will work. It all depends on things like the RAID setup in the BIOS, the Marvell driver and what it is capable of, and so on.

Final result:

I have installed Windows via the SATA ports connected to the VIA southbridge, with no problems. (also had to swap the HD, the 160 Gbyte had some problems, now have an 250gbyte SATA)
After that I installed the marvell drivers (drive still connected to the southbridge SATA).
After all this I connected the SATA driver to the Marvell connector (the internal one) and it tried to reboot: Windows logo showed up but somehow the SBOD (the well known bleu screen) showed up.
My conclusion is: Booting from the Marvell connected harddrive is possible, as long you have the proper SATA drivers for it.

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