ATA external drives to Intel Mini

Related to my recent topic about hard drive capacity, I now have three external ATA drives to use for backup and storage. They can be successfully connected to a main computer via an ATA-USB2 adaptor.

Question: is the fact that the ATA drives are slaves, and are connected via USB, is there any reason what they would not work if plugged into my Mac Mini?

Put another way, is there a potential incompatibility between the older ATA drive technology and a modern Mac, given that the connection is via USB? I'd rather find out the answer before connecting any of the drives via the adaptor to my Mini (or my Macbook).

Thanks ..... Hugh

Answering my own post, and possibly being of help to someone else with this same question in mind, connecting an ATA drive via USB to an Intel Mac (with SATA internal drive) poses no problems whatsoever.

No mate and it is not the problem you thought. Power is power and away you go. No need for SATA or any changes when in an IDE external box.

These are bare ATA drives, two of them in one carrier, a sort-of mini-RAID system, and you have just given me a *brilliant* idea!

I retained the multi-Molex connectors, and the dual ATA ribbon strip, and can have both (never mind the third Seagate drive) running off the one power adaptor. Question is: will both drives mount to a desktop via the ATA part of the adaptor? Woohoo, I LOVE this old No 8 wire technology!

[But with which computer shall I try it, that is the question .]

Have a feeling that external drives have to be set to master to be seen?

Don't you just love recycling old hardware; an 80 gb is now regarded as a small drive, yet I can back up the whole of my wife's MacBook onto a 40 with CCC, and her Time Machine runs onto a 60gb.
Mine takes a little more space though

Cheers

Hugh

hugtheslug said:

Don't you just love recycling old hardware

Click to expand...

I most certainly do!

In helping a friend move from the Dark Side to a Mac, I inherited an old(er) HP Pavilion machine, in pristine condition (but no longer of resale value, sadly). I stripped the HD out of it, still tucked away in its drive carrier, erased it completely, and then added the Seagate 80 to the carrier, thus making a very basic RAID system. Retaining the ribbon cables and molex connectors has enabled two drives to operate simultaneously, same with the dual 80/40 drive combo in the carrier out of my old G3 b/w tower.

Uses? Doesn't matter, but I'll think of something

It's too bad you're not in Texas. I just several days ago unloaded a boat load of hardware including a working Dell Dimension tower from 2004. Hard drives, memory modules, video cards, power supplies, and several monitors all went also.

hughvane said:

thus making a very basic RAID system. Retaining the ribbon cables and molex connectors has enabled two drives to operate simultaneously, same with the dual 160/40 drive combo in the carrier out of my old G3 b/w tower.

Click to expand...

And here they be! [the gap in the carrier to the left is where the floppy disk out of the HP Pavilion drive was.]