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.