IDE to USB 3.0 VS IDE to SATA

[pauliux]

I have 4 IDE hard drives, I'm planning on building a NAS.

I have to options for plugging them in:

1. Get USB 3.0 HUB, 4 IDE to USB 3.0 adapters, an plug them in.
2. Get 4 IDE to SATA adapters and plug them in directly to the MOBO.

I mostly care about the speed, but economics are also quite important. To power those drives I'll be using a desktop PSU.

NOTE: these drives wary in speed, capacity and age.

 

[t53186]

Best practice would be build the NAS with new drives and move all the old data off those drives before they fail.

 

[atljsf]

for a nas, both approaches would work

the thing is find the solution that will not make you open the case an unplug and plug back the cable constantly to make things work

what i would try is the ide to sata, is what most people use for long term usage, the converter to usb is meant more for data recovery, for external usage, not for constant usage

this looks nice

https://www.amazon.com/Generic-IDE-SATA-Adapter/dp/B000RK89M4

but you say you need 4 hard disks, so perhaps a pci express card with two ide adapters would be better

this one has only 1 ide ata port

https://www.amazon.com/QNINE-Controller-Expansion-Express-Convert/dp/B06WVD2BKD/ref=sr_1_2?s=electronics&ie=UTF8&qid=1499261629&sr=1-2&keywords=pci+express+ide+controller

but has other ports, also the ide ata port will suport 2 hard disks with one single ide cable so theoretically you need two of those cards, there is pci models too, in case your mainboard doesn't have enough pci express slots but has a old pci port

https://www.amazon.com/Sabrent-SBT-RDIT-Silicon-Image-Controller/dp/B0007LQKME/ref=sr_1_19?s=electronics&ie=UTF8&qid=1499262057&sr=1-19&keywords=pci+ide+controller

remember that the speed, the bottleneck will be thanks to the ide ata port in the hard disk, most of those old ide hard disks work at 30 or 40(hopefully) megabytes per second(the port limit is 133 megabytes per second but i never found a hard disk reaching anything over 50), basically at the speed of a usb 2.0 port, so forget any usb 3 hub to speed things up, the usb 3 hub will deliver usb 2 speeds because the hard disk itself is not faster to read or write