Mixing PATA and SATA drives

[JoeThePhotographer]

I am looking for an external enclosure for archiving photos.  I view this as a long term investment, so I thought it should accomodate at least 4 drives if not more.

In the short term, a Terabyte SATA drive is all I need.  However, I have a bunch of old PATA drives that I would love to make use of for a while.  Is there any good enclosure out there that allows both PATA and SATA drives to be installed at the same time?

[I realize I asked a similar question at the bottom of another posting, but I thought this deserved its own post.]

Joe

[peterkrogh]

Joe,
I bet that none comes that way, but I recently made my own. I  had a 4-bay PATA box, but am migrating to SATA. I still have a bunch of PATA drives for backup drives.  I bought a new Bridge board from Cooldrives, and a couple of removable SATA bays from Microcenter and now have a mixed box.
Peter

[JoeThePhotographer]

Peter,

What is a Bridge board?  Most likely, I would want to buy a SATA box and find a way to put PATA drives in it rather than the other way around.

Joe

[peterkrogh]

You could use this Bridge Board:

http://www.cooldrives.com/firewire-bridge-board-oxford-912-400-800.html

and this mobile rack to hold the drive:


http://us.st12.yimg.com/us.st.yimg.com/I/cooldrives_2021_4367837

but it would probably make more sense to just buy one of these for the PATA drives:

http://www.cooldrives.com/fi400usb20re.html

Peter