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ross.32

macrumors 6502
Original poster
May 27, 2007
259
0
I bought a 1.5TB 3.5'' internal hard drive. I wanted to use this as a wireless disk so my MacBook Pro could access it through my Airport Extreme.

I bought a Ministack V2 enclosure off of eBay and it came in today. The problem is that I did not read the Ministack's website carefully enough. V2.5 and V3 both support SATA hard drives, but V2 only supports ATA.

Can this problem be fixed with a simple converter, or am I still in the market for a new enclosure?
 
That looks like it to me. Thanks!

The idea behind the DatOptic bridgeboards is very cool and they work great in an case with open space behind the drives like my DatOptic Q-drive multidrive cases, but I think you are going to find that they may be unusable in a a MiniStack case because of :

• lack of space to insert this card between the back of the drive and the built in interface controller in the case
and
• the fact that they vertically offset the IDE and SATA connectors on the bridgeboard will lead (again, in a small propably non ribbon cabled case) to the connectors not aligning satisfactorily.

In an large multidrive case with plenty of space they work fine because you can plug them into the drive, then pull up a ribbon cable to attach to the connectors on the other side with no problem because of the vertically offset connectors. If the MiniStack case does not connect the drive to the back interface board (in the stock configuration) with a ribbon cable though, the offset is not going to work out.

Since you have noted that you want to use it with a 1.5Tb drive (which automatically means it is a Seagate drive) and there have been so many firmware problems reported with those drives, I personally would be uncomfortable using the bridgeboard after reading the note on the brideboard product page that
It accepts Parallel ATA (IDE) commands through the 40 pin IDE connector from the host, decodes the commands and converts them to a Serial ATA commands to the device. Response from the device through the SATA bus are deciphered, processed and converted to a parallel ATA protocol and sent to the host.
That to me says that on top of chasing down drive firmware difficulties, the processing and converting of data done on the bridgeboard would be just one more puzzle piece to sort out if you have difficulties!;)

Finally, adding $16 more for the bridgeboard that might or might not fit is a kicker- kind of makes more sense to cut your losses and just get the right one it would seem!

Good luck with a solution!:)
 
I bought a 1.5TB 3.5'' internal hard drive. I wanted to use this as a wireless disk so my MacBook Pro could access it through my Airport Extreme.

I bought a Ministack V2 enclosure off of eBay and it came in today. The problem is that I did not read the Ministack's website carefully enough. V2.5 and V3 both support SATA hard drives, but V2 only supports ATA.

Can this problem be fixed with a simple converter, or am I still in the market for a new enclosure?

I would just get a different enclosure. Any converter you get will slow your transfer rate and won't operate your drive at optimal speeds.
 
This sucks. The problem is that money is really an issue at this point. Oh well, guess I should just get one. Oh well.
 
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