Syba SY-BIR-IDESA IDE/SATA Converter Bi-Directional IDE to SATA (SY-BIR-IDESA-BP)

So your old PATA (IDE) drives are starting to fail, as is happening to me. What to do? Replace with another IDE drive?You can hardly find new IDE drives anymore. If you can, they're more expensive than a 1 TB SATA, don't have as much cache, don't have the raw speed from perpendicular recording, etc. PATA doesn't seem the way to go for future expansion. No, a new SATA drive is the way to go, but your old motherboard never heard of SATA. How to make them talk to each other...The solution? This converter! As a bonus, unlike a SATA PCI expansion card, this needs no drivers and is bi-directional. So you can run your old IDE drives into the SATA ports on a newer motherboard whose single IDE channel is being used already by your DVD burners. Might be useful someday for transferring / cloning from an old drive to new.As a bonus, if you run SpinRite to maintain your SATA drives ([...]), you know that SpinRite is somewhat SATA challenged. It can't see SMART info thru SATA and takes forever to run the drive using PIO. But if you plug your SATA drive into the IDE port using this converter, voilà, SpinRite sees the SMART data and runs faster!I've noticed there are other bi-directional converters out there. This one is nice for its low profile. Some of the others stick out perpendicular to the IDE connector and I'm not sure they'd fit a typical case.Only ten bucks. Keep it in your bag of tricks for working on others' computers.I had no problems with mine. The instructions are a bit thin, but basically, plug it in to an IDE slot on your mobo (the slide switch will already be set from the factory for this), plug in the provided Y-power connector (red LED on) and plug the supplied SATA cable into your drive. Of course, you'll loose the dual channel capability of your IDE port. But that's to be expected with SATA signaling.It's only SATA 1 compliant, probably a limitation of the IDE port itself. But I haven't seen a SATA II drive yet that can burst beyond 150 GB/sec anyway. Nor would it matter in practice. Some people say on NewEgg reviews that if you have a SATA I/II jumper on your drive, you have to set it to I for this converter. The drive I'm using now is SATA II, but has no such jumper. So I can't say.I haven't tried this backward yet, going from an IDE drive to SATA. Same procedure, except change the slide switch position.I plan to do some benchmarking soon... the mobo I'm using now supported only very early SATA I and I suspect my new WD Caviar Black SATA drive will be faster using IDE UDMA 6 than crippled native SATA 1. I'll try to comment on that when I have the data.I haven't tried it on CD/DVD burner. Don't know that I will.For $10, how can you go wrong?

I bought this adapter so that I could replace my *PRIMARY* IDE drive in an old computer with a newer and much larger SATA drive. When I first booted the CPU, the drive wasn't recognized. After fiddling the the connectors, and booting again, the drive did show up. However, having this adapter plugged into my primary IDE port with a SATA drive connected to it, does the following.1. The bios portion of the boot process went from taking 2 seconds to roughly a whole minute2. After completing the 1 minute bios boot process, the motherboard beeps and I get an error stating that the primary IDE drive is not found. I'm then given the option to either continue, or enter the bios set up.Here's where things get a little weird. If I select "continue" the OS loads WITHOUT ISSUE from the supposedly undetected SATA drive. Or, If I select "enter bios set up" the drive configuration settings show that the SATA drive connected via the adapter is connected just fine.So, even though the bios will always initially report that the drive is not found, the drive works flawlessly and is recognized by the bios when looking at the bios setup. This happens at every reboot. Essentially, the only downside for me is that during the boot process, my computer will wait for me to hit the F1 key before it will load the OS. In my opinion, this is a very minor inconvenience--------------------Given my experience with this product, I had one thought about those who have not had success with this product. Do some CPU's REQUIRE this elongated bios boot process for this adapter to work? If so and you're trying to connect a SATA drive to the *SECONDARY* IDE port, I wonder if the bios sees the primary IDE drive, begins loading the OS, and doesn't give the SATA via adapter through the secondary IDE port enough time to get recognized. I don't know because I did not not test this type of set up, but it crossed my mind.

I thought I had made a mistake in purchasing this adapter. When I first connected all the cables, it simply did not work at all. I was just about to trash it when I discovered the root of the problem. As one reviewer mentioned that the pins on one of the molex plugs were loose and literally one or all of the pins were falling out and perhaps could not be properly connected to the female connector. I wasn't about to trash something that I paid for and especially waited quite a while to receive. Anyhow, I proceeded to glue the loose wires in the affected molex adapters so that they would not move when trying to connect both ends. Rather, I used shoe goo straight from the tube and let it set overnight. I also think that slow drying epoxy will do equally well. The next day, I now had a very sturdy connector with no loose pins and I immediately noticed that the HDD had power. It certainly makes a huge difference if your pins now line up straight and you now have power flowing through the devices. The first time I booted up, it was unsuccessful due to the incorrect switch setting. I immediately set the switch to the alternate mode ( SATA to IDE) and I was in business.I also purchased the other Syba I/O Crest SATA to IDE adapter from Amazon and I had equal success with both. The advantage to this particular device is that it is bidirectional meaning that you can run a SATA device to an IDE/PATA motherboard. Personally, I think that extra $3 spent is worth the added price. Otherwise, a great product to own. I now wish that if they could improve the quality of their molex connectors (pins) and also use a 3.5" FDD power cable instead of a 1/8" jack that they will have a really outstanding product. The 3.5" FDD cables & molex power cable combinations are easily available from Amazon or other suppliers.

Unfortunately, this device never worked for me. I had to recover some data from an old ATA IDE drive, but even though all the cables fit well and the power light was on, I could not see the drive no matter how many times I changed the bios settings and such.The construction is good quality, but don't put too much faith in its universality.

Stopped working after a few weeks. Not recommended.