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Over the years I have used pata and sata hard drive enclosures to convert an internal sata/pata hard drive to an external usb hard drive.
Now I have a whole bunch of internal sata drives lying around and a whole bunch of semi-old computer that only support pata/IDE internal drives.

So I am faced with sort of the opposite problem.

My question is
Is their a cheap way of converting a sata internal drive to work with a pata/IDE internal drive interface. (i.e sata cables/ hard drive to ribbon cables , molex connector type pata drive )

I have the molex to sata power cables so I can get power to the device but when it comes to
converting sata data cable to a ribbon type I have no clue what to do or weather their is some hardware you can buy to convert between the 2 types, i.e sata data 7 pin to ribbon 40ish pin .

Thanks for any help

Get a PCI SATA controller.

cool , didn't know they had them.

Can they work also with non-desktop 3.5'' drives.
Like laptop 2.5'' or nettops ones as well ?

Just wondering for the other types of harddrives as well.

Also do they have pci cards for scsi based ones ?

2.5'' sata is the same as 3.5'' sata. ide was different for whatever reason(i suspect Molex was considered too large), the only problem with laptop/netbook sata drives is fitting them securely in the case.

yes , that was my next problem how to place the HDDs in some of these machines?
The machines are all dell machines
models 8250 , 4600c , 2350 but some of them are missing the metal encloser case inside them for the hard drives.

any suggestions for installing ?

I don't want to buy a ton of hot swapable enclosers
Wondering if I could just get a metal piece or something to mount inside these computers to hold the HDD .

Sam111 wrote:Also do they have pci cards for scsi based ones ?

Who? Google? Did you try?

Sam111 wrote:My question is
Is their a cheap way of converting a sata internal drive to work with a pata/IDE internal drive interface. (i.e sata cables/ hard drive to ribbon cables , molex connector type pata drive )

http://www.ebay.co.uk/sch/i.html?_from= ... Categories

What beats me is why they felt a pressing need to change the design of the power lead, unless it was a job creation scheme for the factories where they manufacture the convertor leads.