A friend of mine has figured out that what makes a hard drive SATA or IDE appears to be a card that is screwed onto the outside with the appropriate connectors on it. He wants to swap them out to make a SATA drive an IDE so he can use it with his older motherboard.
(Yes, I know that there are inexpensive kits to do the same thing with adapters on the outside. I use them myself, the other way round.)
I am dubious. First of all, if this were possible, I’d think I’d have heard of it by now. Second, I would think that the card must be physically connected to the drive in some way – else how does it access the data?
Yes manufacturer would likely produce two models of the same same, except for the format of the connection to the host - one IDE, one SATA, with the difference only occurring in the card , and only the HOST side only of the code.
But also, they may make the drive the same outside shape while the insides of the drive is different, well this would probably occur where they install different numbers of disks, so if the electronics fits the similar lablelled model ( 34MEY-SATA vs 34MEY-IDE ? ) . So you’d want to be sure the donor drive is the same size as the destination, as size specifies the number of platters, as well as making sure the model code is the same and manufacturing date is not too far different… there may be differences just a week apart though, just reduces the chances to have them close…
So just because the electronics is the same shape and fits on the electrical contracts doesn’t mean its ready to be attached to that drive.
Even if you had the size and model codes and dates matched, the changed over card would not know it was driving a new drive and it would remap the wrong sectors. The use of the wrong area on the drives may cause damage to the heads which makes the drive unreliable.
BTW, IDE means “integrated device electronics”, which was an improvement of drives before that, in that before the modulation was performed by the host, eg MFM vs RLL.
There is no scenario where this makes any sense or is even feasable at home. Why not just buy an IDE-PATA drive? They are pretty cheap. Even if he has a bunch of SATA drives he’d do better selling them to buy IDE-PATA drives.
Even if two different drives share the same platter configuration and differ only in the electronics they are configured at the factory with a low level format which marks bad sectors, substitutes reserve sectors, etc. and which keeps track of the events during the life of the disk and reports that information to the host computer using S.M.A.R.T. So even if you changed the IDE electronic control with another one exactly the same from another disk you would still mess it up because the control thinks it has something different, with different sectors, etc.
You can access the SMART info on tour hard disks using programs like Crystal Info. I regularly do. Specially after buying some drive on Ebay. Mostly they are not so reliable.
To expand a bit on my previous post. The electronic control of a hard disk has a lot of intelligence and information embedded and this makes it very transparent for the host system. If a sector starts to give problems reading it the controller will mark that sector as bad and move the information to a reserve sector. The user never even knows anything happened.
The controller knows how many bad sectors there are and where they are and which ones replace them. It knows how many hours the disk has been on in total and how many times it started up. It keeps track of spinup times, temperatures, etc.
This means controller and platter system are paired of from birth and are not exchangeable unless you do a complete refurbish which qould require factory equipment.
When certain parameters pass certain thresholds SMART will warn the host computer. Look at the following report. The disk is marked as “caution” because certain parameters, like reallocated sectors, have been exceeded.
(1) TOSHIBA MK1637GSX
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Model : TOSHIBA MK1637GSX
Firmware : DL030G
Serial Number : X7NLT4GTT
Total Disk Size : 160.0 GB (8.4/137.4/160.0)
Buffer Size : Unknown
NV Cache Size : ----
Queue Depth : 32
Number of Sectors : 312581808
Rotation Rate : Unknown
Interface : Serial ATA
Major Version : ATA/ATAPI-7
Minor Version : ----
Transfer Mode : SATA/150
Power On Hours : 21426 hours
Power On Count : 929 count
Temperature : 35 C (95 F)
Health Status : Caution
Features : S.M.A.R.T., APM, 48bit LBA, NCQ
APM Level : 0080h [ON]
AAM Level : ----
-- S.M.A.R.T. --------------------------------------------------------------
ID Cur Wor Thr RawValues(6) Attribute Name
01 100 100 _50 000000000000 Read Error Rate
02 100 100 _50 000000000000 Throughput Performance
03 100 100 __1 0000000006BF Spin-Up Time
04 100 100 __0 000000000595 Start/Stop Count
05 100 100 _50 00000000001A Reallocated Sectors Count
07 100 100 _50 000000000000 Seek Error Rate
08 100 100 _50 000000000000 Seek Time Performance
09 _47 _47 __0 0000000053B2 Power-On Hours
0A 128 100 _30 000000000000 Spin Retry Count
0C 100 100 __0 0000000003A1 Power Cycle Count
C0 100 100 __0 0000000000A9 Power-off Retract Count
C1 __1 __1 __0 000000103981 Load/Unload Cycle Count
C2 100 100 __0 0036000E0023 Temperature
C4 100 100 __0 00000000001A Reallocation Event Count
C5 100 100 __0 000000000000 Current Pending Sector Count
C6 100 100 __0 000000000000 Uncorrectable Sector Count
C7 200 200 __0 000000000000 UltraDMA CRC Error Count
DC 100 100 __0 000000000092 Disk Shift
DE _64 _64 __0 000000003843 Loaded Hours
DF 100 100 __0 000000000000 Load/Unload Retry Count
E0 100 100 __0 000000000000 Load Friction
E2 100 100 __0 00000000013C Load 'In'-time
F0 100 100 __1 000000000000 Head Flying Hours
This is a laptop I have. I always keep an eye on the health of the disks.
It actually might be possible to do this in a very narrow set of circumstances, but considering that
1: Hard drives are relatively inexpensive these days
2: If this narrow set of drive/IO board compatibility circumstances does not fall into place (and you would have to be pretty tech savvy to know that they were compatible) you could easily wind up destroying the drive
I use different adapters / converters but they rarely if ever give exactly the same result as the real thing.
For example, I have a ton of PATA-IDE drives left over from previous systems. I have USB adapters so that I can just plug in a drive and make backup copies of files. I have about 10 or 12 drives and they get rotated and each one can hold several backups. They are all PGP encrypted so there is no fear of information getting out. But note that these USB adapters only allow the information to get read/write, but they do not allow the motherboard to act as host for the drive, read SMART information etc.
I have not tried to see if PATA/SATA adapters would allow this but there’s a good chance that they don’t. And you probably lose speed anyway.
Really, just get a PATA/IDE drive. They are pretty much free, left over from old systems. The idea makes no sense.
I heartily agree, with one exception. If you are a serious hacker and just want to experiment to see what makes things tick, go right ahead. You won’t be spending much money and you might learn something.
The logic boards on HDs can and are swapped out by data recovery specialists. If a HD dies due to a bad board, the tech gets the same model board from another drive and swaps it out. Some special screws and those easily torn ribbon cables to deal with. Due to the problems mentioned above, straightforward copying of the data off the drive may not be so easy and advanced tools might be required.
If you search eBay for a HD model, you will frequently see listings for just the logic board for that HD. (Presumably salvaged from an HD with bad motor/disks.) Surprisingly, these are usually more expensive than just buying a used model of the HD and pulling the board yourself.
Some logic boards could be used in disks of the same family over a range of sizes. E.g., a specific group of 100, 120 and 150 GB models. But not beyond anything like that.
As to doing a SATA to IDE conversion, IIRC it used to be done when manufacturers made disks in the same type for both formats, but that was a small window years ago.
Just get a PCI-SATA card. I can get them for less than $10. Simple, no nightmares.