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Meritline has the IDE to SATA or SATA to IDE Adapter for $4 with free shipping. Compliant with serial ATA specification, One 4pin power connector, converts serial ATA to parallel ATA.
$4
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If I buy this for an old XP machine is there a limitation on the size of SATA drive I can put in the machine? With this adapter can I put in a 1TB SATA drive in the machine? How about a 2TB SATA drive?
Yes Attikai, yes you can.
XP needs at least service pack #(1 I think, maybe 2) to support drives over 128GB, but after that it will support up to 16 exabytes using NTFS filesystem.
... but if you want a single volume on NTFS to be larger than 2GB you need to increase the "allocation unit size" in the Windows format dialog, for 16 exabytes it would need to be 4K (4096 bytes) so the master partition table doesn't exceed the max possible size.
HOWEVER, there is always a slight chance your old motherboard's bios might not like hard drives that size. All boards that support 48bit LBA (any drive larger than 128GB or actually I mean 137GB since HDD manufacturers don't use the binary definition of gigabyte) are supposed to be able to support far larger drives than 2GB but every now and then you might find one with a bug that needs fixed via bios update.
Thanks for the help, Dave. I'm always running out of space on that computer. In fact I've been using an external drive to hold the music and that old PC is supposed to by the music server. Kinda goofy. I'll grab two adapters and start with a 2T drive. Then maybe I would add a second if I need it down the road. It's running service pack 3 (or whatever is most current) so that should work.