Support

Product FAQs

Is there a minimum size of IDE hard drives I can use with this hard drive accessory?

Note: For more information on how to detect an IDE hard drive, visit http://www.startech.com/faq/hard_drive_accessories_ide_detection.

Older IDE drives are not supported by current StarTech.com products. Typically, these drives were made earlier than the mid-to-late 1990s and are smaller than 1 Gigabyte in size.

There are a number of reasons that older IDE drives may not be detected, including the following:

  • The drive uses PIO (Programmed Input/Output) mode and not DMA (Direct Memory Access).

  • The drive is non-ATA or is using an ATA mode that predates the chipset's compatibility (usually older than ATA-4).

  • The sector size is not 512 bytes.

Unfortunately there is no workaround in these situations. An older system or an older IDE controller card must be used to access older IDE drives.

|
Wait...
Back to top