Are IDE to USB Adapters Reliable?

Shaina11 · Jul 31, 2016

I currently have a couple of Vantec SATA to USB adapters for my 2 TB SATA drives, though I was thinking of getting a IDE/SATA adapter to use with older drives that use the IDE interface. This would be especially useful for repairing older PCs and testing the hard drives.

The problem is, I've heard many horror stories of people's hard drives being fried from these adapters, thus why I went with the more expensive, SATA only adapters. From what I've read, it seems to be primarily the power adapters supplied with the converters. And some have said the molex wires were not wired correctly.

If you search for "fried" in the comments of this amazon page, you'll find all sorts of horror stories of fried hard drives.

So my question is, do these people not know what they're doing, or is it true? And how could one avoid the issue aside from buying a separate molex AC/DC adapter?

R_1 · Jul 31, 2016

as a tech, what I did was get the USB/IDE cable, but power the drive with the power supply in the PC. small 2.5 inch drive can usually be powered from the cable itself (usb 5V), but larger drives will require external (the PCs) power supply.
I do not trust the power supplies that come with the cable, so look for just the cable if you can, or buy a cheap one and discard/recycle the power supply

https://www.amazon.com/Drive-Adapter-Converter-Optical-External/dp/B002OV1VJW/ref=sr_1_12?ie=UTF8&qid=1470016427&sr=8-12&keywords=ide+usb+adapter
throw the power adapter away/recycle. my suggestion. example product. not an endorsement.

if you use 2.5 inch drive no power cord needed

Samer1970 · Jul 31, 2016

Shaina11 :

I doubt that your old IDE drives are still working ... even if they are working ... they are ultra slow by today standard ... There is no point repairing or replacing 15 years old harddisks

InvalidError · Jul 31, 2016

Samer1970 :

I have a bunch of ATA drives that still work perfectly fine after more than 10 years and they aren't that much slower than modern entry-level HDDs for everyday use since the main bottleneck with HDDs is seek time. HDD sequential transfer speeds may have increased by 4-6X since then but seek times have remained practically the same at ~10ms.

The main reason to ditch those old drive is that they are only 30-100GB, which is barely the capacity of affordable thumb drives these days and insignificant in systems that already have a 500+GB HDD or SSD. (I recently consolidated the content of a bunch of 80-250GB HDDs and one 500GB on a single 2TB 2.5" to quit having to hunt down stuff across multiple HDDs.)

Shaina11 · Jul 31, 2016

R_1 :

I wonder if there's a possibility of finding a small low-wattage external PSU just for use with hard drives? That could certainly be a work around, and I would feel much safer doing it that way, thanks for the suggestion.

Samer1970 :

Actually, my IDE drives are still working, and when you build and maintain vintage PCs for playing older games, as an example, games from the 90's/Windows 9x era, it can become especially useful, and, some people still use ancient PCs as all they do is check email, thus, they don't need much power, therefore, their current PC is enough. I have several PCs which are over 10 years old and still running, and are still occasionally being used.

You see, modern PCs cannot play all the games from the 90's, therefore, if you want 3D hardware acceleration in the more intensive games of the era, a virtual machine is simply not good enough, old computers still have a use, IDE hard drives are great for these old machines. And some people still buy and maintain DOS-based PCs as well for the same reason. It's nostalgia.

Samer1970 · Jul 31, 2016

InvalidError :

Yes they will work , but there will be bad sectors every where in most of them slowing them down badly ...come on , you know better !

as for using old PCs for old dos games , $5 SATA cards is the answer for this .. we all added SATA cards to our old pcs remember ?

Shaina11 · Jul 31, 2016

InvalidError :

Or, if you're into older games and PCs, those hard drives are simply perfect for older PCs, so what if they're slower than modern hard drives, and have much less storage? That's how it was in that time frame. Therefore, it just works for PCs from that era.

This is what I'm trying to explain to samer1970.

Shaina11 · Jul 31, 2016

Samer1970 :

Oh yeah? You might be surprised at some drives, and so what? If it's used for vintage PCs, you're not going to be storing valuable data anyway, so it really doesn't matter. Also, not all IDE drives were used extensively, some have less than 1 year of usage, some maybe 1-3, but still in working order.

InvalidError · Jul 31, 2016

Samer1970 :

All of my HDDs are in full working order with no bad or reallocated sectors whatsoever the last time I checked, which is about three weeks ago when I did my storage consolidation.

Samer1970 · Jul 31, 2016

Shaina11 :

Samer1970 :

Oh yeah? You might be surprised at some drives, and so what? If it's used for vintage PCs, you're not going to be storing valuable data anyway, so it really doesn't matter. Also, not all IDE drives were used extensively, some have less than 1 year of usage, some maybe 1-3, but still in working order.

use $5 SATA cards ...

Samer1970 · Jul 31, 2016

InvalidError :

most of my old IDE have bad sectors ... maybe yours are newer ... or less used ...

Shaina11 · Jul 31, 2016

Samer1970 :

You seem to have forgotten that some older motherboards and BIOS have a limited hard drive size which they can read. also may not be possible on motherboards with only ISA slots, sorry. Also, have fun finding drivers for that on Windows 9x.

Shaina11 · Jul 31, 2016

Samer1970 :

Also, you seem to not be aware that for many old DOS games, you need a proper Sound Blaster, and guess what? That requires ISA, and a lot of ISA motherboards only have ISA slots, and as I also stated, you would need to find drivers for the card on Windows 9x, and especially have good luck finding drivers for DOS, that should be fun.

My whole point is, old hard drives and vintage PCs still have a use.

Shaina11 · Jul 31, 2016

R_1 :

Perhaps something like this could work? It seems like a cheap picoPSU could be perfect for something like this. Just for powering HDDs.

Samer1970 · Jul 31, 2016

Shaina11 :

ISA ? lol if you want to go that old then you wont find working HD from that era ... thats like pre 1993 times ... What then a 512 MEGA harddisk ? lol

R_1 · Jul 31, 2016

good luck finding a sata card driver for win 95, or win 98 much less 3.1 or NT.
vintage means old.

Shaina11 · Jul 31, 2016

Samer1970 :

Actually, you can find working HDDs for that era, search the internet. And you didn't need much storage back then anyway, so yes, 512 MegaBytes would be excellent for DOS, DOS games were very small.

Stick to what you like, modern PCs, lots of storage, and go about your life. And I'll stick to mine, a combination of modern and vintage.

R_1 · Jul 31, 2016

Shaina11 :

R_1 :

Perhaps something like this could work? It seems like a cheap picoPSU could be perfect for something like this. Just for powering HDDs.

you would still need a high quality 12V power feed for that, it does not come with the power supply (plug into the wall)

Samer1970 · Jul 31, 2016

Shaina11 :

use IDE to SD card kits ...

Shaina11 · Jul 31, 2016

Samer1970 :

Again, good luck with the drivers.

Shaina11 · Jul 31, 2016

R_1 :

Gotcha, so just a SFF low-wattage PSU of a reliable brand should do, and a few SATA to Molex adapters, which I have a couple of.

Samer1970 · Jul 31, 2016

Shaina11 :

you dont need drivers .. they emulate IDE harddisk

Shaina11 · Jul 31, 2016

Samer1970 :

Here's one more issue for you. SD cards have limited write cycles compared to unlimited on hard drives.

You do realize this argument is pointless and wasting everyone's time, no one, is going to budge, so we might as well drop it. Stick to what you like, I'll stick to what I like. That is all.

InvalidError · Jul 31, 2016

Samer1970 :

Out of my dozen HDDs, only two are newer than five years old and most of them have over 40 000 power-on hours (I rarely enabled HDD spin-down, so that means more than four years of spin time) on them.

Last year, I booted my retro-gaming PC (I practically keep it around only in case I decide I want to play FF7PC) for the first time in I don't remember how long. Its HDD's bearings had seized from sitting for so long. I had to give it gentle sideways taps while it was attempting to spin to get it unstuck. Once it got spinning and warmed up, it sounded and worked good as new again.

Shaina11 · Jul 31, 2016

InvalidError :

Ah, sounds like you have one of the old ones that may park their heads on the platter itself, thus a whack with a hammer to the side can possibly free the head.

Are IDE to USB Adapters Reliable?

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