Would this PATA-SATA adapter work?

[technoob]

4 hours ago, Bowlsnapper said:

Hell, it's 11 bucks. Like I said, if you're trying to research it to see if you should buy a bulk, it may be worth the effort, but if you're only buying one of these for personal use, just spend 9 more dollars and get a startech. Lol.

Yeah, I know I can just pick the startech and go, but it's just weird, kinda against common sense, I mean there are people selling the whole console for 50€, I have to spend 30€ (average prize on ebay) for just a "piece" of it all, for a console I don't use that often? It just looks absurd to me, so I'll just hang around the market to see if the price gets finally humane, lol (afterall, things get old, rarity can be the reason for high price, but they should know nobody's gonna buy those things, as I see them still there for years).

 

[Bowlsnapper]

6 minutes ago, technoob said:

Yeah, I know I can just pick the startech and go, but it's just weird, kinda against common sense, I mean there are people selling the whole console for 50€, I have to spend 30€ (average prize on ebay) for just a "piece" of it all, for a console I don't use that often? It just looks absurd to me, so I'll just hang around the market to see if the price gets finally humane, lol (afterall, things get old, rarity can be the reason for high price, but they should know nobody's gonna buy those things, as I see them still there for years).

 

... Why don't I just buy you a Startech? lmao! I understand the principal you're trying to express, but look at it this way: You're taking a 40 dollar console and turning it into a 200 dollar console if you do what I do (well a few times anyway, so far :p) and put a bunch of xbox games and emulators on it, plus add lighting, etc. It's about 50 bucks for a 2TB HDD, 10 bucks for an 80 wire IDE cable and 20 bucks for a startech. You may end up using the console often if you put certain things on the HDD. Like 20 consoles of emulators and games.  

If it's worth doing, it's worth doing badass!

[technoob]

9 hours ago, Bowlsnapper said:

... Why don't I just buy you a Startech? lmao! I understand the principal you're trying to express, but look at it this way: You're taking a 40 dollar console and turning it into a 200 dollar console if you do what I do (well a few times anyway, so far :p) and put a bunch of xbox games and emulators on it, plus add lighting, etc. It's about 50 bucks for a 2TB HDD, 10 bucks for an 80 wire IDE cable and 20 bucks for a startech. You may end up using the console often if you put certain things on the HDD. Like 20 consoles of emulators and games.  

If it's worth doing, it's worth doing badass!

I dunno... I actually tried to convert the console into a "retro-console" some time ago, with emulators and stuff but many often (even if they're up to date) emulators crashed or they didn't work, so I basically use my PC for emulators, while keeping the console for what it is: an original Xbox for Xbox-exclusive titles which were not available for PC (same goes for my other consoles). At this rate, I'd may wait some more years to find a suitable PC, cheap enough to emulate all 6th gen console easily (as for now, unfortunely, emulation on Xemu, PCSX2 and Dolphin are very demanding and I can barely play them on native resolution, surprisingly only FlyCast is doing well... but the reason is known to anyone: emulators try to guess the mechanics, they don't actually know them exactly). There's plenty to play in the meanwhile and I'm happy with the current Xbox titles I'm able to play (only a few against the whole thing, I know, but it's fine for me).

It's just a matter of "principle" to me, I mean, the only price I could define adhering to common sense for a simple adapter would be... 5€, no more. I hope sellers will understand this, instead of taking advantage of the "niche" factor of retrogaming. But hey, they're selling HDMI resamplers for PS2 at 500$. I hope they feel honest about themselves, lol.

Edited September 10, 2023 by technoob

[tiertop]

On 9/7/2023 at 8:30 PM, Bowlsnapper said:

Well what kind of adapter are you using? Startechs would probably keep you from crashing at UDMA 6. I use it with my Xecuter 3 box and it's fast man.

As far as choking, wouldn't that come down to the quality of hard drive you have and how it works?

I have one of the Startech adapters and some cheapos too.  With my XBox only a regular hard drive is stable at UDMA4/5.   I went looking over the Cerbios official Discord and I saw some chatter about stability problems with UDMA4/5.  I think the XBox is on the ragged edge of the IDE specs if you set it to UDMA4/5 and that a SSD or SSHD push it too hard.

Hard drives do vary in speed, but it's rather meaningless in the modern SSD world.   I used to obsess over picking fast hard drives decades ago lol.   For example, access time measures how long it typically takes a hard drive to find data on its platters. Usually like 12-18 ms. No data is transferring while the drive is locating it.  If the file you're accessing is fragmented, this time gets multiplied to read all of the file. If you're accessing a zillion tiny files and they aren't near each other on the platters, it might take that 12-18ms to find each one.  A SSD's access time is more like 0.01 ms. 1000x faster. A SSHD drive will also have fast access time if data is stored in the flash portion.

And also for comparison, a DVD drive usually has a read access time > 100 ms.

Edited September 10, 2023 by tiertop

[Bowlsnapper]

6 hours ago, technoob said:

I dunno... I actually tried to convert the console into a "retro-console" some time ago, with emulators and stuff but many often (even if they're up to date) emulators crashed or they didn't work, so I basically use my PC for emulators, while keeping the console for what it is: an original Xbox for Xbox-exclusive titles which were not available for PC (same goes for my other consoles). At this rate, I'd may wait some more years to find a suitable PC, cheap enough to emulate all 6th gen console easily (as for now, unfortunely, emulation on Xemu, PCSX2 and Dolphin are very demanding and I can barely play them on native resolution, surprisingly only FlyCast is doing well... but the reason is known to anyone: emulators try to guess the mechanics, they don't actually know them exactly). There's plenty to play in the meanwhile and I'm happy with the current Xbox titles I'm able to play (only a few against the whole thing, I know, but it's fine for me).

It's just a matter of "principle" to me, I mean, the only price I could define adhering to common sense for a simple adapter would be... 5€, no more. I hope sellers will understand this, instead of taking advantage of the "niche" factor of retrogaming. But hey, they're selling HDMI resamplers for PS2 at 500$. I hope they feel honest about themselves, lol.

Those emulators are still demanding? Do you have an old PC? Or maybe I haven't used them in a long time. Well, I hope you complete the build. I understand the principal you're expressing and that you don't want to spend money that you theoretically shouldn't.

 

5 hours ago, tiertop said:

I have one of the Startech adapters and some cheapos too.  With my XBox only a regular hard drive is stable at UDMA4/5.   I went looking over the Cerbios official Discord and I saw some chatter about stability problems with UDMA4/5.  I think the XBox is on the ragged edge of the IDE specs if you set it to UDMA4/5 and that a SSD or SSHD push it too hard.

Hard drives do vary in speed, but it's rather meaningless in the modern SSD world.   I used to obsess over picking fast hard drives decades ago lol.   For example, access time measures how long it typically takes a hard drive to find data on its platters. Usually like 12-18 ms. No data is transferring while the drive is locating it.  If the file you're accessing is fragmented, this time gets multiplied to read all of the file. If you're accessing a zillion tiny files and they aren't near each other on the platters, it might take that 12-18ms to find each one.  A SSD's access time is more like 0.01 ms. 1000x faster. A SSHD drive will also have fast access time if data is stored in the flash portion.

And also for comparison, a DVD drive usually has a read access time > 100 ms.

Is that really pushing it? I have it at UDMA 6 and it works perfectly fine... What has been said to be happening?

I think I will try and SSD in a future build, even though I'm partial to platter drives just because I think they're cool and that the weight would be better distributed that way, but we'll see how it feels.

[tiertop]

On 9/10/2023 at 2:21 PM, Bowlsnapper said:

Is that really pushing it? I have it at UDMA 6 and it works perfectly fine... What has been said to be happening?

I think I will try and SSD in a future build, even though I'm partial to platter drives just because I think they're cool and that the weight would be better distributed that way, but we'll see how it feels.

The XBox will always be a monster block of console regardless of whether it has a HDD or SSD inside. 

I just looked up the UDMA6 thing and see that the Cerbios guys did release a new BIOS that supports it.  I was setting my Xbox up before they released that BIOS. I will have to experiment with the new BIOS.

Edited September 12, 2023 by tiertop

[Bowlsnapper]

7 hours ago, tiertop said:

The XBox will always be a monster block of console regardless of whether it has a HDD or SSD inside. 

I just looked up the UDMA6 thing and see that the Cerbios guys did release a new BIOS that supports it.  I was setting my Xbox up before they released that BIOS. I will have to experiment with the new BIOS.

Here's Cerbios 2.3.1 set to UDMA6. If you don't have a Startech, it may not work at all, so flash with a backup plan and with caution.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Acg0EjnwAJUiatkRm7qSO3wRQYj_bY9X/view?usp=drive_link