Jumper? Pin location

[DARBADARBZ]

I want to use some PATA drives. None will be boot drives. What settings for the pins? I think I heard they're called jumper settings somewhere but I'm not sure. Any recommendations for PATA to SATA to adapters?

 

And yes I want to use them. For nostalgia purposes.

[johnt]

Each drive should have a schematic of the pin layout. They should be in "slave" or "secondary" positions. I am not sure these pins matter in modern configurations. Do you even know if these drives still work?? They gotta be over 15 years old at least.

 

Search for "ide to sata adapter" on Amazon or wherever and see what suits your needs. I have no clue if any of them work though. Adapters like these:

 

 

 

[DARBADARBZ]

3 minutes ago, johnt said:

Each drive should have a schematic of the pin layout. They should be in "slave" or "secondary" positions. I am not sure these pins matter in modern configurations. Do you even know if these drives still work?? They gotta be over 15 years old at least.

 

Search for "ide to sata adapter" on Amazon or wherever and see what suits your needs. I have no clue if any of them work though. Adapters like these:

 

 

 

They work. The oldest one is a quantum fireball from 1998, it sounds so cool. I have an external adapter for PATA, I just want them in my system now.

[mariushm]

IDE cables have two connectors. The one at the end is supposed to have the device that's MASTER (primary) , and the one at the middle is the SLAVE (secondary) device.  If you have a 80 pin ribbon cable with a blue connector, the blue connector is supposed to go in the motherboard.

 

So you look on the actual device (hard drive or optical drive) and you put the jumper across the pins labeled MA (for Master) or SL (for Slave) or you may be able to put the jumper across CS (cable select) which is a sort of "auto select" - not all devices can handle it.

 

Some drives will have extra jumpers like for example to limit capacity reported to system to 32 GB or something like that, for old motherboards with old BIOSes that weren't designed to support more than that.

 

example on hard drive: 

 

optical drive :

 

[DARBADARBZ]

8 minutes ago, mariushm said:

IDE cables have two connectors. The one at the end is supposed to have the device that's MASTER (primary) , and the one at the middle is the SLAVE (secondary) device.  If you have a 80 pin ribbon cable with a blue connector, the blue connector is supposed to go in the motherboard.

 

So you look on the actual device (hard drive or optical drive) and you put the jumper across the pins labeled MA (for Master) or SL (for Slave) or you may be able to put the jumper across CS (cable select) which is a sort of "auto select" - not all devices can handle it.

 

Some drives will have extra jumpers like for example to limit capacity reported to system to 32 GB or something like that, for old motherboards with old BIOSes that weren't designed to support more than that.

 

example on hard drive: 

 

optical drive :

 

So if I was to do an IDE to sata adapter, should I set the drive for slave, Master or auto select?

[johnt]

15 minutes ago, DARBADARBZ said:

So if I was to do an IDE to sata adapter, should I set the drive for slave, Master or auto select?

Try cable select (auto) and see if it works. I don't think you are going to ruin any data on the device if you set it to the "wrong" jumper.

 

Edit: Which position do you set it to when using your external cables/enclosure?

[kokosnh]

If you are using the sata adapter, then the master/slave should not matter.

it only matter if you want to plug them both to one IDE 80 pin ribbon cable.

[johnt]

Honestly you could probably leave the jumper unplugged and it might work (if it's going to work). I don't think there is anything in the Windows boot sequence that relies on that jumper. Windows Boot Manager and UEFI killed those jumpers...

 

Just buy your adapters and try it out.

[Blue4130]

37 minutes ago, johnt said:

Honestly you could probably leave the jumper unplugged and it might work (if it's going to work). I don't think there is anything in the Windows boot sequence that relies on that jumper. Windows Boot Manager and UEFI killed those jumpers...

 

Just buy your adapters and try it out.

Windows Boot mgr and UEFI didn't kill the jumpers, Switching from PATA to SATA killed it. Sata is single drive per cable only. No need for jumpers if you are the only drive on the line.

[mariushm]

Well, with two devices on one cable, to give a clear answer, one drive has to be master and one has to be slave. Ideally, the master drive is at the end of the cable... with some cables and motherboards you may find a drive won't initialize if set to master on the middle connector. 

 

Alternatively, set both to CS (cable select) and let the drives figure it out (but some devices don't handle it well and will just refuse to initialize)

 

The master will be listed before the slave drive, and that matters in bios at boot order, when you select to boot from C: partition. If the optical drive or second hard drive is set to master, the bios will give it C: letter and the main hard drive would get D: or another drive letter.

 

Other than boot order issues, it really makes no difference if a drive is master or slave. 

 

SATA is serial connection, like USB, only allows one device at the end of the cable. IDE and floppy (and ISA and PCI ) are parallel, allowing two devices on each cable (more in the case of ISA and PCI) .. that's why you no longer need jumpers. 

 

PCI-e is groups of serial links, any device can use either only one link or multiple in parallel, but the links are not shared between slots.  

 

So in modern computers we pretty much moved on from parallel busses (except RAM) to serial busses, because the reduced number of wires helps and technology has improved making serializers and de-serializers cheap.