legacy.not404.com

 After nearly 7 years of faithful service, "bigdaddy", my Tower PC, started showing signs of its age.  Granted, it's a mere Dual-CPU Pentium-III system (on an Asus CUV4X-DLS motherboard), it was definitely one of my most reliable machines I've ever built.  In fact, I've done most of my Xbox-Linux work on this machine.

One of the best things about "bigdaddy" was the fact that I used three Removable Media enclosures like this one to populate the remaining IDE drive bays.  This was how I got almost everything done for the last 7 years:  just like how I used to use floppy discs in the 80's, I used to use Hard Discs, pre-formatted and installed with specific "builds" of what I wanted.  I could go from Linux to Win98 to WinXP just by swapping out the main hard drive.  The only thing I had to worry about was the "Master/Slave" setting on the drives -- I had two "Master" bays, and only one "Slave" bay available (the CDROM was on the Secondary Slave).

To my dismay, new motherboards now sport a handful of SATA channels, and only one IDE channel.  That posed a bit of a problem for me:

•     I still have a LOT of PATA hard drives that are useful.  Even if I found SATA enclosures, I'd end up abandoning a lot of high-end PATA drives before I've gained a decent Return on my Investment.
•     I still work with devices that will never use SATA natively, like my Xbox collection and my Asus WL-700gE router.  

So, if I wanted to continue using Bigdaddy like I always have, I needed a way to use my PATA drives on the new motherboard's SATA channels.

Dongle to the rescue!

Well, not quite.  While these dongles DO convert PATA to SATA, they aren't quite as useful for a Removable Bay enclosure.  Can you guess why?  Yep, when the Removable Bay is EMPTY, these dongles still signal the motherboard that there's a device on that channel -- which causes the motherboard to wait for a long, long time when the machine starts up.  The system will startup once the channel times out, but it takes way too long for my taste.

The Modification Plan

I stewed over this problem for a few days, and came to the eventual conclusion that what I needed was a way to disable the Dongles if the Removable Bay is empty.  I knew what I needed to do:

    Cut power to the PATA/SATA Dongle if the Removable Bay is empty; and connect power if the Removable Bay is occupied.

A quick order on Mouser.com, and I have my solution ready to go:  a spring switch with a long enough lever.

Fortunately, the Dongles came with their own power-connector adapters.  I decided to sacrifice these into building a wiring harness suitable for the job, by lopping off the big molex end. 

The only real trick to this mod is making sure you do a clean job:  Solder the GND end of the wiring harness (Black wire) to the Removable Media's GND, solder the +5 end of the wiring harness (Red Wire) to the switch, and solder another wire (Green Wire) connecting the switch to the Removable Media's +5 rail.  Of course, you'll need to fiddle with the multimeter to determine which two poles on the switch are "connected" when the lever-arm is depressed.  I also shrink-tubed the wire ends and tacked the wires down with some hot-glue.

After all the soldering is done, the last task is to hot-glue the switch into place.  I chose to mount it right at the corner, after a few tests with a Removable Media cartridge installed.  Tip:  Cover the area between the switch and the lever-arm with tape.  That will prevent the hot-glue from running up into the lever-arm when you're positioning the switch, and save you all sorts of grief.  (Yea, OK, so I found that out the hard way.  Good thing I bought extra switches!  :-p)

Whew, look at all that work and effort!

Once the soldering is done, simply route the wiring harness through the Fan Hole.  If you actually HAVE a fan on your enclosure and want to keep it, you'll need to find (or drill) an alternative route.  Now it's time to mount the PATA/SATA conversion dongle onto the Removable Media enclosure.  For that, I turn to my favorite thing next to Duct Tape:  Outdoor Mounting Tape!  You can find this stuff in any hardware store -- if you can find the aisle that has Address Numbers that you can tack up on your home or mailbox, you'll probably find this tape close by.  (They sell it in smaller spools -- I just bought a huge spool because I use this stuff all the time)

So with a careful measurement, stick the mounting tape above the original 40-pin IDE port.  We'll tape the dongle to that in a moment.

Remove the red plastic protector layer

And connect the dongle while pushing the whole assembly against the mounting tape.

ANd then you can trim the excess with an X-acto knife.

As a final cleanup, tack the loose wires with hot-glue so they don't get in the way when you're mounting the Removable Media Bay.

And that's it:  a power-switch for our dongle that activates when a cartridge is inserted.  I did 4 of these for "Bigdaddy", since my motherboard has 6 SATA channels available, in addition to the IDE channel for the DVD Burner.

Bigdaddy is now fully assembled with its new Core 2 Quad motherboard, CPU, 4 Gigs of RAM, a graphics card, a USB media reader, a DVD burner, and four of my newly modified PATA to SATA Removable Media Enclosures.  It fires right up, and now the empty bays don't hold up my bootup times.  YEAH!