New PATA Drives?

Ian_Eb

Ian_Eb

Ian_Eb

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17 Oct 2002
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Congleton, Cheshire
Hi,

At work we have a load of old kit on site. These are all bespoke systems and are only able to take PATA drives. Has anyone seen any new units for sale recently or are we better just trying to come up with a different solution?

How reliable are the SATA - PATA adapters that you do see around?

We have also tried refurbs etc and it is just too much hassle as they fall over with greater frequency than we would like.
 
PATA went obsolete 10 years ago. Last manufacturer of drives we could find for spares was WD, but they stopped supplying in 2013. Find the late model numbers and go hunting for stock perhaps?
 
That's what we are up to now. This is just in the vague hope that I can find somewhere with 20 or so unused drives. We can buy them in and this should cover us until the panels are replaced.

Customers expect these things to work forever without expecting to have to upgrade/replace anything ever!
 
Just a thought ... what about Compact Flash to IDE adapters?

EDIT : Preferably a reputable company like Startech, not some no-name crap off eBay. ;)
 
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I found the IDE->SATA adapters to be quite rubbish, I tried 4 different ones and they all caused random drive disconnects which would crash the computer.

I think the key to keeping old PATA drives running is to make sure you use some kind of active cooling on them, most of mine have been running fine for years, but every time I have moved one to a different PC or drive enclosure where there isn't a fan blowing on them has caused them to fail within days.

I wouldn't really advise using compact flash either, they are slow and the cost per GB tends to be quite bad :(

Only suggestion I can think of is using a cheap PCI/PCI-e SATA controller and then use normal SATA drives. The adapters are not very fast, but they will likely be faster than using old IDE ports.
 
Lol - PCI???

This is prehistoric ISA bus kit! There is a programme in place for replacement but it takes time and budget (which they don't have)

The drive lives in a cooled part of the enclosure but there is physically no space for extra interfaces without some inventive jamming it into place.
 
Roughly what specifications are the machine? From what you're saying, they're 486 machines. Motheboard upwards and from Pentium Pro (Socket 8) had PCI slots - usually a mixture of ISA and PCI slots. I think from Socket 7 motherboards they started introducing AGP slots, but they were still fairly uncommon.
 
ISA bus. :eek:

I'd be surprised if an ISA motherboard would even talk properly to a late era PATA drive. Either that or it'd see it as 500Mb.

What are they used for?
 
If they really are 486 era then the compact flash might be worth it, you could just go for whatever is cheapest and you would still be swimming in drive space. The compact flash adapters don't do any signal converting so they should be a lot more reliable than the IDE->SATA ones are.
 
OK, so it's late supercharged 486-era. The chipset is PCI architecture just without the slot due to the form factor.
 
The IDE-SATA adapters I've used in the past have been terrible. Sometimes the PC would fall back to PIO mode :eek:
 
Agreed regarding the pata to sata converters - the ones I tried were never reliable.

It looks like you can still get PATA SSDs, either the 40 pin plug-in module type or 44 pin 2.5" laptop ones that you could use with a simple cable adaptor. Would the cost/capacity of these be an option? Depending on how it's used, the number of writes might be a factor if it limits the operational life.
 
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