Terastation HD-HTGL/R5 w/PATA HDs Do PATA-to-SATA Adapters Work with SATA Drives

[joeldm]

I have an ageing Terastation HD-HTGL/R5 with a PATA interface and no SATA. Would it be possible to use PATA to SATA adapters to install larger SATA HDDs or even SSD drives in this device and still have it work as a NAS device?

I also have a question about firmware, looking up my device Buffalo only shows the 1.12 firmware update, but I see many references to a 2.14 etc update that some users are talking about for the same model. Is there a link for that firmware or are such updates very serial number specific and what Buffalo support shows is what I get?

Any assistance would be appreciated!

Serial: 15801061112723
Product: TeraStation I - HD-H1.0TGL/R5

Joeldm

[1000001101000]

sata->pata adapters seem to work with this model reasonably well. I would expect that you would see problems with drives larger than 2-4tb for various reasons related to the device, the pata/sata adapter and the OS/firmware. I believe the largest I ever used eith it were 500gb PATA drives though I have done some testing with 16/32gb SSDs.

There is a funny quirk with that setup but you don't need to worry about it.

SSDs support something called TRIM which gets enabled by default by systems that support it.
the linux 2.4 kernel in the stock firmware pre-dates TRIM and so do PATA->SATA adapters so it will just be ignored.

If you were to boot a modern linux kernel on the device you'd find that the kernel would detect that the drive supports TRIM and try to use it only to encounter errors because the PATA->SATA controller and/or PATA controller don't support it.

I always used to get those firmware versions from the Japanese site:
https://www.buffalo.jp/product/detail/software/hd-h1.0tgl_r5.html

[davo]

That unit must be close to 20 years old at this stage, given that it hasn't had any security updates in nearly 15 years, coupled with the fact it doesn't support modern secure protocols I think you'd be better served looking at a new NAS entirely.