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zoran

macrumors 601
Original poster
Jun 30, 2005
4,881
136
What might be the fate of IDE enclosures? Can they be somehow upgraded to work for SATA drives or something else?
 
Electronics recycling service.

The main problem is that these enclosures have old disk controller chips that won't support the size (capacity) and bandwidth of today's large SATA drives.

The chips were designed in an era when the disk capacities were much smaller. The controller chip in an IDE enclosure from 2008 isn't going to recognize a 16TB SATA spinner even if you could find some sort of reasonably priced and electrically compatible conversion cable.

Furthermore, the physical clearances in these types of enclosures rarely allow for any sort of extension cable or extra electronics.

Lastly, SATA enclosures are cheap. Retrofitting an old enclosure with geriatric capacitors (and other components) makes zero sense.
 
Retrofitting an old enclosure with geriatric capacitors (and other components) makes zero sense.
Your not wrong, but I guess I’m too emotionally connected with a couple of IDE enclosures I have, and don’t really want to give them for recycling. 😉
 
be the first to do a youtube video how to diy convert your old IDE direct connect boxes.
 
Electronics recycling service.

The main problem is that these enclosures have old disk controller chips that won't support the size (capacity) and bandwidth of today's large SATA drives.

The chips were designed in an era when the disk capacities were much smaller. The controller chip in an IDE enclosure from 2008 isn't going to recognize a 16TB SATA spinner even if you could find some sort of reasonably priced and electrically compatible conversion cable.

Furthermore, the physical clearances in these types of enclosures rarely allow for any sort of extension cable or extra electronics.

Lastly, SATA enclosures are cheap. Retrofitting an old enclosure with geriatric capacitors (and other components) makes zero sense.
Over in the PowerPC section we're still dealing with these. Although I suspect, we probably use 2.5 enclosures more as Powerbooks/iBooks use 2.5 drives.

That said, a lot of members have been converting to SSD. In our G4 laptops that's mainly m2 SATAs in a SATA/IDE enclosure or an adapter. My own 17" Powerbook G4 runs a 128GB mSATA.

So we're a bit behind the curve as far as this stuff going to recycling. But not that far behind I think.
 
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