Problem wuth USB to IDE/SATA bridge.

[Geek-9pm]

A warning to those using a USB to SATA and IDE converter
http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/260456-32-warning-sata-converter
The full story is on Tom's Hardware. This is not new, but good to know.

[DaveLembke]

Thanks for sharing. I have 3 of these. One of the originals which was just IDE for 2.5" and 3.5" drives on either side and 2 others which support SATA and both IDE drive connections.

One of my friends thought that it was cool to add another internal hard drive by using one of these long term with a USB cable that popped out the rear of the computer and plugged into USB port, but was powered off of the P-Connector from PSU. He had a motherboard that only had 2 SATA ports on it and that only left 1 port for HDD and the other for the DVD-ROM.

I tried to convince him to just buy a PCI slot type SATA controller to add more SATA ports, but he decided to beat me to it with this "much slower" setup. Going to share this with him to make him aware of the potential for data loss.

[Calum]

Surprise as JMicron controller causes problems
JMicron, Marvell, Via, Asmedia, et al are controllers I wouldn't even put an optical drive on.  They're the first thing I disable in the BIOS on a build that has them, before even installing Windows, due to their inconsistent performance and reliability.
I have (accidentally) bought bridges and add-on cards such as USB controllers and SATA cards with chips from the above, and returned them all without opening them to buy one using a different brand due to the problems I've had over the years with them.

[DaveLembke]

JMicron, Marvell, Via, Asmedia, et al are controllers I wouldn't even put an optical drive on.

hmm... I think I am going to look over some StarTech USB addon cards I have to see what they have for branded chips.