Old and New Tech Together, Cheap: TekGems’ Compatibility Adapters for Ultra ATA and Serial ATA Drives- Page 4/5
January 31, 2007
By
Thomas Soderstrom
Ultra ATA controller to Serial ATA Drive Adapter LA-USDE06
Ultra ATA supports two drives per connector, but conversion to SATA eliminates these master/slave combinations, supporting only a single drive. Few folks seem likely to be willing to expend one their few remaining Ultra ATA connections in its entirety on a single Serial ATA drive, but if the need arises, TekGems has a solution.
The straight shape allows this adapter to stick up from most motherboards in a configuration ideal for many builds but impractical for a few, depending on the location and orientation of the motherboard’s Ultra ATA header. The average user can look to see if this orientation perfectly matches his or her needs.
Performance appears good for the most part, with transfer rate limitations showing up during cache transfers in Sandra 2005.
The SATA drive to ATA100 controller graph (blue) follows the native SATA150 transfer graph (red) almost perfectly. Note that the saw-toothed graph curve is typical for the SP1614C hard disk drive and has nothing to do with the controller or adapter.
Unfortunately, this adapter didn’t work properly with our Asus P5B Deluxe-WiFi/AP’s on-board JMicron controller, as drives were initially detected but later "dropped out" during use. Yet it worked perfectly with our previous-generation boards, and tested well on our recent 975X board with its previous-generation on-board disk controller. We therefore recommend this part only for use with previous-generation controllers.
Events
IE 7
Firefox 2.0
