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ATA HDD to USB?

F

FUNCLE

Experienced Member
Joined
Aug 11, 2008
Messages
65
Is there an adapter out there that an older IDE drive (ATA2) can covert to a USB drive? Nearest thing I've found are PATA to USB adapters which fail to initialize an older drive.
 
PATA and ATA is the same. It was renamed to PATA when SATA came up to prevent confusion.

USB can only access block devices. Because of that, such adapters require hard disks that can talk LBA. If the drive supports CHS only, it's not going to work, no matter what adapter you use.
 
Thanks, I believe it's just a CHS only drive (Quantum 270mb) and kind of figured it was a "no go". I had a workaround and used a CF card for a slave drive to image the original drive. Wanted to leave the drive in it's pristine state.
 
FUNCLE said:
Thanks, I believe it's just a CHS only drive (Quantum 270mb) and kind of figured it was a "no go". I had a workaround and used a CF card for a slave drive to image the original drive. Wanted to leave the drive in it's pristine state.
Click to expand...
From Stasson.org https://stason.org/TULARC/pc/hard-drives-hdd/quantum/MAVERICK-MV-270-AT-270MB-3-5-SL-ATA2-FAST.html

"The Quantum drives support both the Extended CHS (Cylinder Head
Sector) and LBA (Logical Block Address) addressing methods in
overcoming the 528 MB DOS capacity barrier."
 
One other thing to try might be PATA-SATA adapters. These probably do less or different mapping paradigms, so I was able to get an old Seagate ST351A/X connected through one (40Mb, so probably long before anyone was thinking about LBA)
 
I have a WDC Caviar 2850 (850MB) that works beautifully when directly connected to a computer, but fails miserably with any ATA2USB adapter I've tried. It supports LBA. On the other hand, I have a Quantum Maverick (270MB) that works nice in the same adapter where the WDC fails to work. No LBA for this one, so it must be something else.
 
I have three different IDE-to-USB adapters, acquired over many years. Using them, I have always had mixed results with PATA drives. I decided to bring those three adapters and some PATA drives out of storage and record the success/failure results at [here].

I have not done further experimentation, e.g. changing the partition types.
 
modem7 said:
I have not done further experimentation, e.g. changing the partition types.
Click to expand...
I did some experimentation. Observations follow:

* Two of my IDE-to-USB adapters have a molex plug that can be used to power the drive. There is some question as to whether or not that molex plug can supply enough power for the spin-up power requirements of some (repeat: some) 3.5" hard drives.

* A particular combination of adapter and drive required that I wait about 30 seconds (after turning on the adapter) before the drive appeared in Windows. It was not due to the spin-up time of the drive because, minutes before, I had powered the drive via a dedicated AC adapter. A different drive on the same adapter takes only seconds.

* The contents of the drive can sometimes affect whether or not the drive appears in Windows. See notes 5 and 8 at [here].
 
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Chuck(G) said:
I've used one of these for a few years. Even worked with PATA DVD drives. I don't recall any issues, but then it's been strictly on Linux machines.
Click to expand...
I have a couple of those and a lot of 2.5" / 3.5" drives, The very small drive's less than 504Mb and some other's 504Mb > ??Gb do not show up in windows or linux mint, I've also tried in plain old dos where some drives are recognized by the bios but can't be accessed and some drives stop my computer from booting.
To get those drives working i hook em up to to an ide cable in another computer or my XT 5160 i use for testing running the XUB.
 
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