Re: IDE to USB Converters
On 05/02/2017 06:02 AM, Martin McCormick wrote:
If one buys an IDE to USB converter for an older chassis
that currently can only boot from the IDE interface, will a
bootable usb thumb drive work with such a setup?
I actually have been using an IDE-SATA converter on these
systems but 2 of 4 SATA drives have completely died after 7 or 8
years of service and thumb drives are cheaper and can be
written to and read from on anything from a raspberry Pi to a
P.C.
The SATA drives that died simply don't even act like they are
plugged in. Oh, they get slightly warm but they don't show up as
a device.
On 05/02/2017 08:20 AM, Martin McCormick wrote:
> I know that the picture I have in my
> head is a board with an IDE connector on one side and a usb port
> on the other where one installs the thumb drive. It looks like an
> IDE drive to the mother board.
>
> The systems which will use the adaptors can't boot off of
> their usb2.0 ports and even if they did, they would be so slow
> that one wouldn't probably be too happy with the results.
>
> When using the IDE-SATA adaptors, these systems actually
> respond to shell commands and key presses much faster than they
> did using an electro mechanical IDE drive because they are always
> running at full speed so a seek to anywhere is governed by the
> bus speed and not how fast the heads physically move.
>
> Anyway, the reason I didn't just order one is to make
> sure that we aren't talking about the other direction. I have one
> of those and it works fairly well when one wants to format a SATA
> drive or work with an old IDE drive.
On 05/02/2017 09:41 AM, Martin McCormick wrote:
> Thanks for responding. I failed to mention that those SATA disks
> were SSD disks so it probably makes more sense to just buy some
> replacement drives as the IDE-SATA adaptors are still good.
I use SanDisk Ultra Fit USB 3.0 16 GB flash drives (~$10 each) as Debian
7 system drives in P4 and newer systems. They come close to saturating
the USB 2.0 ports on my older machines (~25 MB/s read and write). They
work fine as a poor man's SSD for headless servers, but can get choppy
for interactive use (notably, concurrent write loads).
IDE to SATA adapters and SATA SSD's are definitely going to be at or
near the pinnacle of performance for your machines.
Other possibilities include:
1. Get a USB 3.0 flash drive and install Debian onto it using a capable
computer. Then for each and every USB port on the target computer, plug
in the USB flash drive with Debian and work through various combinations
of BIOS settings to see if you can make it boot. STFW for the same
make/model motherboard to see if anyone has figured it out.
2. Install a USB 3.0/PCI adapter that supports booting from USB flash
drives and repeat #1 for its ports.
3. Buy IDE flash modules or SSD's.
4. Install a SATA/PCI host bus adapter (HBA) and buy SATA SSD's.
Understand that a given motherboard might have one or more PCI buses,
and each bus might have one or more connectors. For maximum
performance, you want only one adapter card on each PCI bus. (For PCIe,
each connector usually has a dedicated bus.)
David
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