Yousuf Khan wrote
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.

And some can be used either way.