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SATA drives on old DImension 4500
I have an older (circa 2002) Dimension 4500. I had a 500GB IDE drive in it and that failed. Fortunately, it was under warranty, so the drive manufacturer sent me a 750GB SATA drive in replacement. I was able to use it by buying a SATA to IDE converter but the performance is poor. The PC is significantly slower. I'd like to know if there is a PCI-based (not PCIe, since this PC doesn't have PCIe) DATA controller that will allow me to boot from the drive. I'm using the A04 version of the BIOS, which seems to be the newest BIOS supporting the original motherboard. Has anyone here done this?
rdunnill
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July 11th, 2012 17:00
I had a 4550 set up with a $15 Syba 150R card. It booted fine and performance was excellent. The only caveat was that I had to reflash its onboard BIOS, as it was set up from the factory for RAID, which I didn't want. The same card is currently installed in a 2350, which I believe is older than the 4500, and supports large SATA drives (with sizes greater than 2.2tb).
I've never used an IDE-to-SATA converter and wouldn't recommend one.
CookieEater
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July 11th, 2012 17:00
So, how did you flash the Syba's BIOS? Where did you get the new BIOS? Does the 4550 and the 4500 use the same BIOS?
rdunnill
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July 11th, 2012 19:00
I used a DOS-based utility downloaded from the chipset manufacturer's site: www.siliconimage.com/.../searchresults.aspx
The Silicon Image BIOS is particular to the SI 3112 SATA chipset, and will work on any PC.
www.newegg.com/.../Product.aspx