Question SATA Options for an old (circa-2002) motherboard

[Kompute]

Hi,

I have an old PC with an Intel D845EPT2 motherboard. It has no SATA connectors on the motherboard, so I'm stuck with IDE. What are the options - if any - for getting SATA drives to work with this? I'm not bothered about speeds, just worried about drives failing and not being able to get hold of IDE ones anymore.

I have a whole bunch of SSDs lying around, though. Problem is they're all SATA, even the spinny disks I have are SATA.

I know there are SATA PCIe controller cards you can get, but not sure if any of those would be compatible with a PC this old, and I'm not even sure if this particular motherboard supports booting via PCIe.

Any guidance would be much appreciated.

 

[rgd1101]

why keep the old pc?

 

[Kompute]

why keep the old pc?

Because that's what I do, upcycle kit. Keep stuff from going to landfill. Refurbish, donate, showcase old tech at roadshows etc. Everything still works. Just getting hard to source IDE spinnys that are in decent condition.

 

[rgd1101]

the slot on that anicent motherboard is pci, not pcie.
and the bios have to support boot from a slot too. is that a thing back then?

there a some adapter https://www.amazon.com/Kingwin-Adapter-Convert-Devices-Compatible/dp/B002SZDOM6/ not sure if they work

 

[BFG-9000]

Retro computer users generally don't use their old computers enough to worry about wearing their old vintage IDE drives, which were made in such huge quantities that you could always get used replacements (I suggest something with FDB like Barracuda IV or newer to avoid the ball-bearing whine).

People who do use their vintage computers daily in say industrial settings to operate old CNC equipment need more reliability so have mostly switched to CF-to-IDE adapters to go solid state. The truth is available IDE interface SSDs are terrible and no faster anyway. This works because Compactflash is IDE, so in your case will work at the full Ultra ATA/100 your ICH2 is capable of. The trick is you have to make sure to use a CF card supports that DMA transfers or it will be stuck in slower-than-dirt PIO mode. No, you're not going to get anything like TRIM working so will occasionally have to zero-fill the empty space to keep write performance satisfactory--you will just know when it's time to do this because everything slows to a crawl.

If you want to use your SATA drives, those SATA-to-IDE adapters often work fine but most are shaped to fit into an IDE drive to be able to use it on SATA boards, so if you plug one of these into your motherboard then you can only run half as many drives because you'd lose the 2-drive (master and slave) capability of an IDE channel. You may have to buy a number of types to find some that work as back in the day I couldn't get Silicon Image or jMicron chipset ones to work with ATAPI drives (they worked fine on IDE) and back then Marvell and sunplusIT chips were considered the most reliable. Note that not all of these are bidirectional so you should look for ones that say they are, or have a direction switch

I see a jumper on this one for selecting Master or Slave on your SATA drive:

 

[BFG-9000]

BTW if you do decide to go the 32-bit PCI SATA card route, it will be bootable so long as it has an option-ROM (which is the card's BIOS) on it, and you can just go into the PC's BIOS and select boot from SCSI device. Beware though as many such cards are RAID-only. And of course 32-bit PCI will limit the speed of even SATA-150.

Many actual SCSI cards were not bootable because they had an empty socket where the opROM would go, since those cards were intended to run peripherals like scanners and not to actually boot from a SCSI HDD. Video cards also require an opROM chip (usually referred to as a vBIOS) to boot in legacy BIOS mode.

Almost all of my 15,000rpm SCSI disks are now dead but very few IDE drives have failed, so this is a case where Consumer grade turned out to be far more durable than Enterprise.

 

[Misgar]

I've used a number of different ISA cards with SATA ports, bought new in the past or picked up second hand on eBay.

One type has two internal SATA1 (150M), one external eSATA and one 4-pin IDE port. I have not tried booting Windows via these cards.

The image below is from AliExpress, but the link takes me to a 404 page.

https://www.startech.com/en-us/cards-adapters/pciesata2i

 

[TerryLaze]

Don't use any drive at all, get yourself an ide2sd card and use sd cards, those are completely transparent to the bios, al it sees is an ide drive.
You can have an SD for every OS you want to run and just switch them out easily, stick them into your modern PC to make changes install stuff take backups and so on.
You can get some that come with brackets to fit into an pci slot on the back of your pc.

Otherwise as mentioned, ide2sata cards work fine as well, just make sure it's converting from sata to ide, best to get one that has a physical switch to choose between the two.

 

[BFG-9000]

In general, CF cards are faster than SD because CF uses the full 16-bits wide IDE data bus while SD is only 4-bits wide (people already complain about the slow speed of eMMC which can be 8-bits wide because it has more pins than SD). SD cards can be made cheaper than CF because the drive electronics are in the reader/adapter rather than in the drive (IDE means Integrated Drive Electronics) but that of course can lead to compatibility problems where newer and larger SD cards often cannot be read in older readers.

See the square chip made by SST in Misgar's photo? That's the opROM that makes attached drives bootable. If it's not there or only has an empty socket where it would go, attached drives could still be used as data drives but cannot be booted from.

That is a very curious stock photo the AliExpress seller chose, seeing as Promise PDC20376/378 has no known 64-bit driver even for XP or Vista, so would be limited to a 32-bit OS... but then any CPU that could run in i845 is also 32-bit so it could still work for OP. Just seems like an odd thing to sell nowadays when there are so many 32+64-bit capable chips like PDC20369,
Silicon Image 3112A, Jmicron JMB363, VIA 421A like that Startech, Marvell or SiS they could've chosen instead to be able to sell to a wider customer base. Oh well, if you order it you'd probably get something completely different from the photo anyway.