Our Picks
Here are the ATA and SCSI host adapters we recommend:
- ATA host adapter
Promise Technology. An add-on IDE adapter is needed to upgrade systems with older motherboards or in which an embedded ATA adapter has failed. For example, we use an recent Promise ATA adapter to test ATA-133 hard drives in one of our testbed systems that supports only ATA-100 natively. Promise makes a variety of add-on IDE host adapters, one of which should suit your requirements (http://www.promise.com).
- ATA RAID host adapter
Promise Technology FastTrak series. RAID has historically been limited to SCSI servers or high-end workstations, but the Promise FastTrak adapters make RAID affordable by using inexpensive IDE drives. FastTrak adapters are available in for various UDMA levels, with two or four interfaces, and with support for varying RAID levels.
- Serial ATA host adapter
SIIG. Serial ATA hard drives are now readily available, and will eventually replace parallel ATA drives entirely. If you upgrade older PATA systems and would prefer to use SATA drives, you can add SATA support by installing an inexpensive SATA adapter. Although SATA adapters are available from several companies, the only ones we’ve used are those made by SIIG. They’re cheap, easy to find, and just work. What more could anyone ask for?
- SCSI host adapter
Adaptec. For SCSI host adapters, we recommend Adaptec exclusively. Adaptec makes many models, from inexpensive models intended to support Zip drives and scanners to mainstream models ...