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[theresetbutton]

just like everyone here, I'm going down the sata-ide bridge route... IDE's wont be around forever.

What I have:
Xbox v1.6 with aladdin mod chip (M8+ with 137gb+)
10gig (of course)
and a hitachi 500gb sata2 hard drive
3 (yep.... and still no luck) sata-ide bridges

I've been trying to get a sata-ide bridge to play ball with me, and I have figured out the following:

Jmircon JM20330 (this is an ebay cheapie... you can tell these from the single jumper... its only for master/slave): These bridges are GREAT for pc users who want to use a single hard drive. If you put two drives on a single cable, the bridge decides it doesnt want to work so well.

SATALink SPIF223A (if you see a bridge on ebay with the words on the board RXD 629A, your looking at this. Dealextreme also uses this chip): I've goten two of these. the dealextreme one DIED before I put it in. and one I got from ebay, is giving me error 9's. HOWEVER, this ebay bridge works fine both as a single drive, and with a slave on a pc.

I'm not the only one whos ever had problems, and now I'm trying to get to the bottom of this. Does anyone have a solution to this problem??

[scullc]

I reported my (positive) experience here
In fact that thread will help you massively - covers most things when upgrading to a HDD/SATA drive.

[obcd]

Besides the sata2ide chipset on the convertor which is important (as you already found out) , some other issues seem to cause problems as well.

1. Some sata harddisks work and others don't work. It's unclear why this is the case.
2. Some sata harddisk have problems starting up.
This is either due to the spinup current being to high or due to a timing issue (they need more time to become operational.) You can supply the harddisk with another external supply (like a spare disk connector from the supply of a running pc.) to see if you have problems with that. (Just make sure the gnd of your xbox is properly connected to the GND of the other supply. Install an extra gnd wire to be sure.)
3. Some harddisks become extremely hot. The cooling in the xbox is less than the cooling in a pc case. While problems caused by this won't show up directly, your harddisk will only have a very short lifetime if it becomes to hot. (This is not only a sata disk problem)

[theresetbutton]

alright, well I got an opertunity to check it out with a seagate 500gig, and it worked first time.

So, Rule of thumb, Hitachi make wicked vibrators (men apparently need to know this   ), but their drives leave a lot to be desired. PROBLEM SOLVED  

next time, I think I'll need 2tb, this 500gig isnt lasting long