Tablet Tales

By Jerry Pournelle

September 1, 2003

(Tablet Tales :  Page 1 of 1 )

Column 277 (Continued from the Previous Week)

Installing Serial ATA

When I built the D865 Pentium 4 system I had a good Seagate 7500 RPM 120 Gigabyte Serial ATA drive, and a data cable, but no way to connect the drive power. Serial ATA drives use a different power input connector from ordinary drives. The S-ATA power connector is designed to facilitate hot plugging, which is nearly impossible with the standard Molex drive power connector. Some S-ATA drives including Maxtor include both the S-ATA power connector and a standard Molex power connector, but the Seagate models include only the S-ATA power connector. At the moment very few power supplies include S-ATA power connectors but that will change as manufacturers phase in new models, and most power supplies manufactured after September, 2003 will include S-ATA power. Of course the old ones will remain in stock for some time.

Lassie: the Intel D865 system in an Antec Sonata case, on the workbench.

Just now, though, neither Fry's nor COMPUSA nor any other store I could find in Los Angeles has the Molex to S-ATA converters. Telephoning Fry's to find out if they have anything like that is generally useless because there are only two people in the computer components department who would know what you are talking about, and it's usually difficult to impossible to get one of them on the phone. The others will cheerfully tell you they have left-handed smoke shifters, come out to the store. It's not malice; they just don't know anything about the products they sell.

Anyway, I did a rapid tour of all the stores I could think of, and while I found some of the devices for converting Parallel ATA to Serial ATA, and plenty of Serial ATA data cables, there were no power cable adapters.

 Page 1 of 1