Daniel Prince wrote:
Yousuf Khan wrote:

what I did recently was that I converted two of those old
IDE drives into SATA drives using an IDE-to-SATA converter board that
fits right onto the back of the drives themselves.

What brand(s) of converters did you use? Did you try any of them on
optical drives?

No specific brand, just bought some generic stuff off of Ebay. They are
still working great. In fact, the drive that was showing spin retry
problems has been upgraded in HD Sentinel's health ratings from 40% all
of the way upto 76% now.

I didn't try them on optical drives, just hard drives. I don't
anticipate that there would be any special issues with optical drives
though. I'm actually still running all of my optical drives off of IDE
cables though.

I am having problems with my IDE cables AGAIN. I would like to get
rid of all of them.

It's probably a good idea. The units cost less than $10 each (actually
usually you'll find them under $5 including shipping), so even if they
don't fix your problem, it's not a huge expense. Just make sure you get
the right type, some are for SATA devices to IDE cable, whereas others
are for IDE devices to SATA cable.

Yousuf Khan