Best 3.5" to 2.5" IDE Adapter?

[timidpimpin]

I have officially run out of 3.5" IDE hard drives, but I do have several good 2.5" IDE drives that I would rather use over buying more 3.5". I have the proper bracket to mount a 2.5" in a 3.5" bay... though I have never bought one of these adapters in my life. It will be used in a Sawtooth and a Gigabit Ethernet.

I would appreciate if anyone with experience with these adapters on PowerPC hardware could offer any buying advice.

 

[eyoungren]

Well, since Addonics seems to be the thing for me lately: https://www.addonics.com/products/aa25ide35.php

$4.99. Never used one, but their IDE enclosure for my mSATA SSD has been good and I'm not the only one who uses this brand.

 

[timidpimpin]

Thanks! I will grab 2 or 3.

Since you have experience with their products... please give me your opinion on something. What will be faster... one of these connected to the the ATA66 in both towers, or the same HD in a 2.5" IDE firewire enclosure? I'm thinking the ATA66 will be faster because it's rated to be 16MB/s faster.

 

[eyoungren]

Thanks! I will grab 2 or 3.

Since you have experience with these... please give me your opinion on something. What will be faster... one of these connected to the the ATA66 in both towers, or the same HD in a 2.5" IDE firewire enclosure? I'm thinking the ATA66 will be faster because it's rated to be 16MB/s faster.

I would go wth the ATA.

I have a 2TB RAID on my G3 server and it has a Firewire connection. Great right, fast, all of that? Yeah. But turns out the the transfer rate was choking the FW bus when transferring files of a GB or more. The only way around this for me was a PCI SATA card with connecters for eSATA. That put the RAID's eSATA connection right on to the PCI bus where it was better handled.

Now, you're G4 is not a G3 but the same principle will probably apply. The actual IDE bus is better equipped to handle this I think.

 

[timidpimpin]

The B&W G3 is known for less than stellar firewire, but I agree that ATA should be better.

 

[1042686]

I had a number of 2.5 hdds in usb2.0 external enclosures from laptop SSD upgrades so to utilize them I ended up running them off the internal facing USB port on a 5port pci card.

Not quite as fast but at 480mbps it works well for storage & I didn’t need to buy anything. A little double sided foam tape and I was in business.

I did runOS9 off on one but it was noticeably laggy as the drive would spin up.

 

[bunnspecial]

The adapter is totally passive, and I've had good luck with just about any generic adapter I've thrown at it. Most of the ones I've used have been on printed circuit boards with the respective connectors.

With that said, I'd think long and hard about using a 2.5" drive as opposed to getting more 3.5" drives. 3.5" drives are still readily available in a wide variety of capacities(250gb is common, 500gb not too difficult with a bit of digging). 2.5" ATA drives aren't uncommon, but at the same time they are getting a bit thin on the ground.

There's also the performance issue-most ATA 2.5" drives are 5400rpm or slower, and 7200rpm drives are quite scarce(I'm hording a few). Most recent/late production 3.5" ATA drives are 7200rpm, and you have to REALLY reach back to find one slower than 5400rpm. Unless you get into crazy capacities(crazy meaning 750gb), 3.5" drives still are relatively inexpensive in terms of price/capacity.

The B&W G3 is known for less than stellar firewire, but I agree that ATA should be better.

Where did you get this? I've never had anything but rock solid FW performance from B&Ws.

USB is a different story, esp. since it's USB 1.0 and not 1.1.