Can I boot and use Sata drive on IDE laptop using adapter?

Hi folks.
The title says it all. My ancient Hitachi harddrive died at the age of 15 as of today but it was merely used so its death was all of sudden. My ACER ASPIRE 3000 notebook only supoorts IDE interface and I CANNOT find any health 2.5" IDE/PATA drives here. So I came across this:


Do this adapter really work if I plug a SATA 1 or SATA 2 SSD drive emulating it IDE? Can I rely on this for lossless and stable I/O data transfer without any integrity failure? My last chance is that. So I also would like to know if I can boot from the SATA drive physically connected to that adapter?

Hope your experiences solve the myth.

Beat regards,

Onur

 

Yes, it will do fine. There's little difference in the data itself, it's just just the way it is transmitted that separates the two; single bits at once over multiple pins (parallel ata) or multiple bits sequentially over the same pin (serial ata). That's why the adapter is so small; it has very little to do except splitting/merging a bunch of bits.

Not all laptops will be able to fit that adapter though; it has an offset in height from one connector to the other, so the SATA drive will probably end up sticking out quite a bit and you'd have to dremel a hole in the bottom cover. Conversely, an IDE->mSATA adapter will always fit flush in any system, but then you'd need to source an mSATA drive. The ~100GB models are pretty cheap, so you could settle for a drive with less capacity instead.

 

Hi friend. Thanks for your brief reply. Yeah fitting will be the main problem as there is at least 1 cm missing room through the outer edge and dremelling is quite tough process and requires qualified cutting equipment plus sensitive workmanship. Worse, if I decide to use a 44 pin (actually 43 pin you know) IDE extension cable to move the SSD out of the bay to use it outside, there is no guarantee that the extension ribbon cable would work flawless with IDE-To-SATA adapter mentioned and pictured above in my first post


The other problem with your suggestion as option, if I follow your wise advise and get an IDE-To-MSATA adapter, it would fit with no hassle using a mSATA drive for sure. It is OK. But this leads another problem based on my research. As you know traditional 2.5 IDE ports require 5V to operate whereas mSATA SSD drives need 3.3v voltage. That means the board must have a voltage regulator that strips 5v down to 3.3v and it has it in the picture below. And what i read is, the regulator gets very hot during intensive operation and has a great potential of damaging the SSD which is sticked / screwed on top of the regulator when assembled due to overheating within the long term usage.



Also I see many adapters still using JMicron JM20330 chip which is really outdated and has limited capability/performance with recent SSDs, there seem to be newer JMD330 and JMH330 variants but I couldn't see adapters shipped with these

So many concerns and issues replacing a dead IDE laptop drive here and I am quite lost and upset because of not finding a stable and guaranteed solution.

I am waiting more comments, I appreciate.

Btw, my laptop is Acer Aspire 3000.

Many thanks for reading as well as comments.

Best regards.

 

You won't get the SSD's full throughput anyway; parallel ATA is limited to or 100 or 133MB/s (depending on the system), so that's roughly what these adapters will deliver. It will still benefit from much lower latencies, so there'd still be a performance improvement.

If you're worried about heat from the onboard buck converter you could choose a full-sized adapter instead:

• IDE 50 Pin 2.5 Inch to mSATA Adapter Board
• 2.5" IDE mSATA Flash drive

If you get a new system at one time or another then you could recycle the mSATA either directly (if it has a slot), use a single SATA adapter or use two adapters and get a very fast external drive instead (at ~500 MB/s):

• 2.5in SATA to Mini SATA SSD Adapter Enclosure
  
• SATA to USB Cable with UASP

 

I would have a look on EBay. In a brief search, I found both refurbished and new drives. I would think one of these would provide a solution. You might consider buying more than one, in case you decide to keep the laptop "forever"
Best,
Joe

 

Hey! Thanks for the tip about the mSATA board which seems more convenient solution in perspective of heat dissipation. Though it uses same controller chip, it is OK. But why do they call this board as 50 pin? There are exactly 43 pin + 4 jumper pins at total 47 pins, as can also be seen from images?

 

Because the IDE connector itself is 50 pins (two rows of 25 each), even if three of them aren't populated. It's the same with panels; they can be designated 30, 40 or 50-pin, but none of the panels and stock cables have all of those pins in actual use.