Introduction
Anyone
who has bought a motherboard in the past 6 months is likely to
have SATA capabilities onboard but it's also likely that you don't
actually have any SATA drives to hand. It could be that you have
some drives lying around that you wouldn't mind adding to your
system. Perhaps you'd like to have only one channel in use from
your IDE headers. Whatever the case, it would be nice if you could
have your cake and eat it too, and use those SATA headers without
buying SATA drives. Well Highpoint
have the answer in the form of there RocketHEAD 100 Serial ATA
to Parallel ATA adaptors. As the name suggests, these adaptors
will allow you to connect your standard ATA100/133 drives to your
SATA headers with the minimum of fuss, so lets check out the specs
and move onto the nitty gritty.
Specifications
Dimensions
59mm x 28mm x 18mm
Number of IDE channels 1
Maximum number of drives 1 drive per RocketHead 100 converter
Supported Hard drives IDE hard disk drives - up to ATA133
SATA controller support Supports HighPoint SATA host adapters
(RR1520, RR1540, RR1542)
Supports motherboard SATA controllers (onboard)
Multi-level RAID support Supports RAID 0, 1, JBOD, when two RocketHead
100 converters are used with the RR1520, RR1540, or RR1542 SATA
host adapters. RAID 0, 1, 10, and 5 are supported when four RocketHead
100 converters are used with the RR1540 or RR1542 SATA host adapters.
Supported OSs Windows 98/ME, Windows NT4.0, Win2000, Windows XP,
Linux (SuSE, Red Hat, Caldera, Turbo), and FreeBSD
Additional Features Large hard drive support - drives exceeding
137GB
Plug and Play installation
Transparent (no software needed)
Improved airflow inside the PC (compact SATA cables)
Durable plastic case
A Closer Look
The
box for the RocketHEAD 100 follows the same Yellow scheme as the
rest of the SATA products in Highpoints line up, coming in a box
a bit smaller than a floppy disk (though deeper obviously). Included
with the package is the RocketHEAD 100 Adaptor itself, a power
cable and a 1 sheet installation guide. You'll note there is no
included SATA cable so you'll need to have these if you want to
use the RocketHEAD 100.
Installation
is pretty simple. Take any ATA100/133 Hard Drive (ATA33/66 drives
are not supported), set it to master and connect the RocketHEAD
100 adaptor to the IDE header on the drive. Then plug the supplied
power cable into both the 4 pin Molex on the Drive and the floppy
header on the RocketHEAD 100 adaptor, connecting the power cable
to a standard 4 pin Molex from your PSU. Plug in your SATA cable
and your good to go!
Obviously
you can use these RocketHEAD 100's for RAID systems by getting
one for each drive, but the adaptors will only convert one drive
each. I want to bring attention to the size of these adaptors,
because I don't know if it was just me, but seeing these online
for some reason I thought they would be bigger. But if you look
at the picture with them connected to a drive you can see how
small they actually are. Simple stuff really, and very easy to
install. Ok let's see what effect they have on speeds.
NEXT
