SATA Adaptor Compatibility thread

[jezj]

Hi,

Its pretty simple, one piece in between the adaptor and the drive. Another piece the other side of board at the bottom against the casing to hold the sata connector in place.

[Tom M.]

Hello everybody,

I am now waiting for PATA to SATA adapters. And I am a bit worried by some of the comments here about the need for 80 pin cables. I hope this is all nothing but bullshitting. If the Xbox is using only PIO mode 4, 40 pin is more than enough.

[professor_jonny]

I think some of the adaptor are not shielded properly as only work with a 80 core cable properly.

[Tom M.]

Is it necessary to set master/slave/cable select jumpers on DVD drive and SATA adaptors? Assuming there are no cable select options on most of the adapters. All I know is that the hard drive should be set to cable select, that's the way I've got it set up but it is a PATA 80 GB Seagate. I never touched the DVD drive. Duox2 with Xecuter btw. But I think I once forgot to set cable select and the PATA HDD booted fine even when it was I think MASTER. So perhaps does not matter at all when there is DUOX2?

[xman]

I always use cable select on my adapters. It was using no links that made it cable select by the way. Master should also work though.

[Coldly-Indifferent]

Has anybody here any recommendation/direct experience of a good IDE > SATA HDD adapter bought recently in the UK, and still available of course?

I've just got hold of a WD 320 SATA and I was going to use it with my laptop as an external backup. However it is whisper quiet and as the WD 160 IDE HDD I have in my most used Xbox has always annoyed me with its relatively loud, higher pitched tone, compared to the Seagate IDEs I generally use, I've been thinking about using it as a replacement for that instead.

I already have the replacement 80pin IDE cable recommended when using SATA drives but as I've never used a SATA drive in a Xbox any advice appreciated.

[Geeba]

Pretty sure this is the one I've used a few times.... problem is the picture is usually for illustration purpose only.... I've had them turn up before with different capacitors the surface mount type and they didnt work.... but for £1.50 not worth worrying about

http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/251747710950? ... EBIDX%3AIT

[Coldly-Indifferent]

At the price certainly worth a punt, so thanks for that.

[5960soft1.6]

The Sabrent SATA adapter did NOT work with the WD Blue 2TB HDD in my case.

However the Kingwin SATA to IDE Bridge Board worked Quite well.
The Part will be called Model# ADP-06.

Got the Kingwin at Micro Center, - They are online & have store fronts.

2

[mark3p]

Just to add another opinion to the thread. I have el cheapo no-brand sata converter board and it would only recognise my 1.5tb WD greenpower properly if I used an 80 pin cable, everything else including the stock ribbon resulted in errors as chimp booted and then not seeing the drive.

[Tom M.]

Well to be honest I don't care about anything else than a 120 GB SSD working like a charm.. including Soul Calibur 2 IGR... any sort of shit in terms of freezing, long boot times, need for anything else than retail 40 pin cable etc. and I am quickly back to good old PATA Seagate 80 GB HDDs... just to let everyone know... I do not intend to play over here... still waiting for the SATA to PATA adapters from China...

Xbox needs 100% working IGR fast booting environment, no shit allowed

[Feeder]

For the record I modified a few XBOX systems for the kids over the holiday.

I ordered the following parts from Deal Extreme back in November.
Adapters: http://www.dx.com/p/241466 ($4.99 USD each)
Cables: http://www.dx.com/p/9182 ($3.78 USD for two)

Hard drives were spare parts from old PCs Seagate 250GB and Western Digital 1TB green drives, I didn't bother checking model numbers I just plugged drive in until I had ones that would lock.

Additional notes:
- I treated the 80 wire cable as required after troubleshooting the first one. I will admit that the cheap cables I ordered don't fit well as there is not really enough wire for a comfortable routing from the DVD to the HDD. With some cable origami I was able to route the thing past the case screw hole and secure it with tape for re-assembly.
- On the DX adapter there are 40 pins. I re-used one cable where pin 20 was blocked to key the orientation of the cable. I simply removed the corresponding pin off the adapter and there have been no issues.

[Tom M.]

OK I receiver the adapters (Agestar STI-2) and I am a bit worried. The manual is completely in Chinese but I can see some words like 80pin PATA pointing out to the cable! They don't want to tell me that I cannot use a 40pin PATA cable do they? Also there are only 2 optons on the jumper: ON device 1 default, OFF device 0. So I don't get why you are saying you can have cable select on these adaptors...

Time to try to connect the SATA HDD and see the reality.

[fxmech]

Push forward, relax, disregard the Chinese

You very well just need an 80wire cable. But try booting with the jumper on, then off. If it doesn't, you can try fiddling with your bios to see if anything can be done. That is, if you have a chip/TSOP.

[Tom M.]

I must admit that 80 wire cables are improvement as for the speed. And you need them otherwise the Xbox will not boot. I have installed the ASUS black cable from a motherboard package and I had to plug the DVD drive first, then the motherboard and the HDD as last. Otherwise it would not fit, the PC IDE cable is different and short.

I am disappointed with the SSD though. NHL Hitz Pro still does not manage to set up the textures in time when launched from HDD, for the first time you run the standard stadium game before it makes the cache. Must be the issue with the code itself.

And most importantly: with the SSD I am not able to launch MS Dashboard from Evolution X - error 21. Does not happen with magnetic HDDs - both IDE and 2,5" SATA, SSD only issue.

Update: I copied the C from magnetic HDD and it works now on SSD. Strange that it did not work right after AID 3.0 installation though.

Nevermind, I am going to keep the SSD inside. I don't need to launch MS Dashboard and SSD means more durability and less noise, unfortunately no real speedup.

[Tim4885]

I just wanted to confirm that I have also used the Agestar STI-2 adapter with a 640 GB WD 6400AAKS HDD and it worked fine. The interesting thing is that I was able to clone my original Xbox HDD to the new one using chimp with the original Xbox IDE cable but I have to use an 80-pin IDE cable to actually use the new drive or else the Xbox gives me an error 13 screen. I was confused about the jumper setting on the adapter initially but discovered that with the jumper on it is set to slave and it is set to master with the jumper off. Not sure about cable select mode like the other person said. I definitely notice everything loading faster with the 80-pin cable.

[Coldly-Indifferent]

Pretty sure this is the one I've used a few times.... problem is the picture is usually for illustration purpose only.... I've had them turn up before with different capacitors the surface mount type and they didnt work.... but for £1.50 not worth worrying about

http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/251747710950? ... EBIDX%3AIT

Just a follow up post to say I bought that IDE/SATA adapter, it came very quickly from China and I used it with a factory new WD 320GB SATA HDD and 40 pin/80 wire IDE cable on a Xecuter 2.6 chipped v1.6 Xbox. It works perfectly.

Cold booted an AID v4.53 disc and the HDD was recognised, formatted and dash installed in less than 5 minutes. Most of that time was XBMC4Xbox being installed as an app.

Only trouble I had was with routing the new IDE cable. I don't know as I didn't think to check whether the orientation of the connectors was different from the original Xbox IDE cable. Whatever the cause I had to go back several times, disconnect it, fold it carefully in the appropriate places to get it to route clear of other components without it twisting awkwardly. I was really worried I'd damage it in the process but it was still fine even after all that manhandling.

[Tom M.]

Those IDE cables are really a problem. I have currently 2 kinds of them: ASUS black cables from motherboard packaging where the longer parts is over 30 cm and shorter part under 10 cm - these fit well in all Xboxes if you use the order like this: DVD - PCB - HDD. Another type of cables are so called 45 cm (yellow) cables that have the longer part under 30 cm and shorter part over 10 cm. These have to be plugged like the original: PCB - DVD - HDD but will only fit so so if you have those late production Samsung drives - their IDE connectors are more to the right compared to the older drives. With the older drives, such a cable will fit, but there is quite a lot of strain since the DVD IDE connector is further from the HDD IDE connector. The good thing about these cables are those holds at the connectors - they prevent the cable from going straight down to the PCB at the IDE port. Of course all of them have the opposite orientation of the IDE connectors compared to original Xbox ones, hence the problems. So probably a cable with the length of at least 60 cm would fit without strains but on the other hand would be too long at some points.

And IMO there is no need for rounded cables since the only place where they might interfere with ventilation is at the IDE PCB connector at the back of the DVD drive where there is actually no real ventilation at all, nor any chips that requite that. In fact, the flat cable seems to fit much better in the tight space between drives and Xbox hood.

http://i.imgur.com/rJ8LBVm.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/0hj6uNH.png
http://i.imgur.com/FzuGIAk.png

[Coldly-Indifferent]

Yes, I certainly wish I'd chosen a longer IDE cable - mine is 18"/46cm and I'd say that you'd be hard pressed to use one shorter than that. With the MB > DD connectors where they are there is a lot of 'wasted' cable length when used for this purpose. But that is true even of the original Xbox IDE cable it was replacing which is 22"/56cm in total.

The DD in question here is indeed a late model Samsung.

That picture of the bunched cable with the SSD is very similar to what my set up looked like initially but I had enough extra cable to avoid it having to bend around that caddy pillar at the back. The difficulty was the cable at the back of the DD which, because of the plug's orientation, ends up pointing down and has to be twisted or folded up to go under or over the DD power cabling.

The position of the folds also has to be fairly precise to get it from the DD > HDD and plug it in so it is not causing too much strain on the SATA/IDE adapter. The way I have done it means it does, just, still fit under the IDE cable retainer on top of the plastic HDD caddy but what with having to curl the cable over to fit the plug there is almost nothing left to spare.

If I buy another for one of my other Xboxes I'll be looking at those in the 24"/60+cm range but there don't appear that many, one 30"/77cm I found and another 39"/100cm. I guess these could be folded/bunched if most of that length is between the HDD and DD but too much MB > DD cable would be difficult to deal with.

[Tim4885]

I also initially used this 18" 80 wire IDE cable (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... -_-Product) and had the same problem of it barely fitting but it still worked. Startech also makes a 24" 80 wire cable which is sold on Newegg and Amazon but I felt was too expensive so I bought this one instead (http://www.amazon.com/CableWholesales-U ... +ide+cable). The cable works great and is just the right amount of length and is well constructed. You might have to spend a few minutes figuring out the folding but it is a good cable.