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Upgrading Drives to SATA
A Review of the Addonics IDE to Serial ATA Converter (ADIDESA)
By Arthur Whalem

Many Mac users are looking for ways to keep older computers up to date. The Addonics IDE to Serial ATA converter (ADIDESA) is an adapter that can help. It plugs into the back of an IDE PATA drive and converts the PATA interface into an SATA interface. This adapter allows you to utilize existing PATA drives that you may have with internal or external serial ATA PCI-X host adapters for Macintosh at an affordable price.

Why would I want this?
If you have existing PATA drives that you would like to use with a PowerMac G5 and an SATA host adapter this adapter will allow you to do so. If you would like to use PATA drives larger than 128GB on older PowerMac G4 pre-Mirror Drive Door models with an SATA host adapter the Addonics IDE to Serial ATA converter will allow you to do that to. You can use the Addonics IDE to Serial ATA converter to convert any PATA hard drive to work with an SATA interface. There is no need for good PATA hard drives to be left behind.

Performance
Test #1
In this test a Maxtor 250GB Ultra 16 DiamondMax 10 PATA drive was tested using Drive Genius 1.1.1 on a PowerMac G4 1.42GHz mounted in the front drive bay. It was also tested using the Addonics IDE to Serial ATA converter while mounted on a FirmTek SeriTek/1S2 SATA PCI host adapter card in the same PowerMac G4 1.42GHz. The computer has 1.5GB of memory. The green bar is the Maxtor 250GB using the SATA interface. The blue bar is the Maxtor 250GB mounted in the PowerMac G4 front drive bay.

Sustained Read

Maxtor 250GB SATA interface is green. 250GB in PowerMac front drive bay is blue.

In the Sustained Read test the Maxtor 250GB PATA hard drive performed a little better using the Addonics IDE to Serial ATA converter with the FirmTek SeriTek/1S2 SATA PCI host adapter card. The adapter allowed the drive to use the SATA interface which provided some performance improvement.

Sustained Write

Maxtor 250GB SATA interface is green. 250GB in PowerMac front drive bay is blue.

In the Sustained Write test above the Maxtor 250GB PATA hard drive using the Addonics IDE to Serial ATA converter with the FirmTek SeriTek/1S2 SATA PCI Controller card displayed performance improvement. This should help speed up tasks when copying data to the drive.

Random Read

Maxtor 250GB SATA interface is green. 250GB in PowerMac front drive bay is blue.

In the Random Read test the Maxtor 250GB PATA hard drive did not demonstrate significant performance advantages when using the SATA interface.

Random Write
Maxtor 250GB SATA interface is green. 250GB in PowerMac front drive bay is blue.

In the Random Write test above the Maxtor 250GB PATA performance was enhanced by using the SATA interface.

Test #2
A number of disk intensive activities were recorded with the same Maxtor 250GB used in the front drive bay of a PowerMac G4 1.42 Dual with 1.5GB of memory. These tests are shown in the "Front Bus" column below. Next, the Maxtor 250GB was tested using the Addonics IDE to Serial ATA converter while mounted on a FirmTek SeriTek/1S2 SATA PCI Controller card with firmware 5.1.1.1S2. These tests are displayed in the "1S2" column. The same tests were also run with the 250GB drive mounted in the rear bay. These tests are displayed in the "Rear Bus" column. As a reference point, these tests were also performed using a Western Digital 250GB SATA drive (model WD2500JB) on the 1S2 host adapter. Tests performed include startup, shutdown, rebuild permissions, running Disk Warrior, and other operations. Each drive is bootable and has 134GB of data on it.

Where Can I use the Addonics IDE to Serial ATA converter?
The Addonics IDE to Serial ATA converter requires an extra inch of space behind your PATA hard drive. As you can see from the image on the right the adapter plugs into the IDE port on the drive and a "Y" power cable provides power for the drive and the adapter. The SATA connector plugs into the adapter and the other end of the SATA cable plugs into an SATA host adapter PCI card.