[mythtvnz] IDE-SATA adaptor?

[Stephen Worthington]

On Sat, 28 Jul 2012 13:21:41 +1200, you wrote:

>My backend needs more storage. It has no more sata ports, and no more
>PCI/PCIe slots to put in a SATA card.
>
>It does have a spare IDE header on the motherboard. Is there an
>adaptor that I can use to convert the motherboard's IDE header to a
>sata drive? Google kinda tells me there is, but I can't find any
>locally, and there is a deal of confusion from my google searches. The
>confusion is between adaptors that allow you to use a IDE drive on a
>SATA motherboard on the one hand, and what I want (SATA drive on IDE
>motherboard) on the other hand.
>
>Alternatively PCIe to 4 sata port card that works with linux (I have a
>PCIe to two SATA port at present).
>
>Or a source of IDE 2 or 3 TB hard drives?

I would also recommend the ST Lab S-250 put a SATA drive on a PATA
cable.  I have two of them in my OS/2 box.  It they work in OS/2, they
will certainly work in Linux!  Do not buy the ST Lab S-240, that is
for putting PATA drives on SATA cables.  I have tried another of the
SATA <-> PATA converters that is supposed to be bi-directional that I
got from Dick Smith or Jaycar.  It gave me lots of trouble, which all
went away when I replaced it with an S-250.  The SATA interface on the
S-250 (and all SATA <-> PATA converters) is only SATA I (1.5 Gbit/s),
but that is still faster than the PATA cable can do anyway.

When I ran out of slots on my old motherboard, I moved my tuners to
USB ones to free up a PCIe x 1 slot for a two port SATA card.  For a
four port SATA card you normally need a PCIe x 4 slot or better,
unfortunately.  I would expect most to work in Linux, as the same
chips are also used on motherboards.  Watch out for the drive
addresses rearranging themselves when you add PCIe SATA cards - I
found my card became /dev/sda and /dev/sdb and displaced the internal
SATA ports up two letters.

In my case, I was using a PVR case that could take full ATX
motherboards, so when my old uATX motherboard became unstable, I chose
a new standard ATX one with 6 onboard SATA ports, 2 eSATA ports.  It
also has up to 4 USB 3.0 ports (2 on the back panel) which can be used
for USB 3.0 external hard disks.  I have not tried USB 3.0 hard disks
with Linux yet, but the specs say the interface should be almost as
fast as SATA (5 Gbit/s vs 6 Gbits/s, which is faster than all hard
drives (except maybe SSDs).  I also have an extra PCIe x 16 slot, so I
could add an 8 port SATA/eSATA card if that ultimately became
necessary.  So I now have 3 internal hard disks in the case (all it
will fit), two drives on SATA cables hanging out the back of the case
(on the internal power supply), and one eSATA drive in an external
drive mount.  Which still leaves me with one more eSATA port and the
USB 3.0 ports.

My entire motherboard, CPU and 8 Gibytes of RAM was only about $550,
so I think it was a very cost effective upgrade from my old
motherboard's 4 SATA ports.  The new CPU and extra RAM means that
commercial skip processing happens in real time on up to four
recordings at once, which really cuts down on the disk accesses as the
data is all still in RAM cache.  So I would recommend seriously
considering a motherboard upgrade as the best option.