Hi, I just did this today. As in the title, this is the SATA mod for the "v0" series of consoles... I used an SCPH-10000. To perform this mod, you will need the official External HDD and a SATA-IDE adapter. I did this with the development version (DTL-H20400), but there is no reason why it would not work with the retail version. For the SATA-IDE, I used a StarTech IDE2SAT, although any similar drive mounted adapter with the Marvell 88SA8040 chip should work just fine... basically not the cheap eBay crap. I recommend that you only do this on a spare official External HDD however, as this mod WILL "screw up" the casing. I had a spare external HDD case (bought it with HDD already removed), so this wasn't an issue for me. Once you have the External HDD in front of you, open it up by removing the four screws at the base. Once this is done, remove the bottom portion and pinch the visible HDD cage at the sides to release it from the top portion of the casing. Remove the official HDD inside, and unless you have a particularly small SATA-IDE adapter, you will need to bend the front part of the HDD cage, or remove it if you so wish, since it would prevent the HDD from lying flat. Next you plug in the SATA-IDE board to the IDE port, connect the molex connector to the respective molex port, and plug in your HDD to the SATA-IDE board. The HDD will stick out from the front, so the top casing will not fit any more... although the bottom part of the shell will still screw on just fine, should you want it. And that's it, as far as the modding goes... I used a 2TB Hitachi Deskstar and it works perfectly. But to transfer games, you will need to do it differently if you use any drive bigger than 1TB. WinHIIP is going to be a bitch; on my drive, it reported -184.99 GB available, i.e. negative! To get around this, you will have to use HDL_Dump. To even get the drive detected, you will need to format it first, and the only front-end for HDL_Dump that provides this is Lord Bogami's GUI as far as I know. Connect the HDD to your PC, select "work on PS2", "local" on the right hand side, "Read TOC", and then "Format" at the bottom right. You will get a "no images" message, and that just confirms that it properly formatted. The drive will then be ready for PS2 usage, but you will still need to use HDL_Dump or one of its front-ends to transfer games to HDD. Once you finish, insert it into the external HDD cage, connect the PSU, connect the HDD to your PCMCIA card, start up Open PS2 Loader, and it should show the games. Start one, kick back and enjoy! N.B.: uLaunchELF also reports negative gigabytes like WinHIIP does for over 1TB HDDs, although it shows the true HDD size but with a minus in front, and creating/managing partitions seems to work like it should. I hope that this tutorial comes in useful to someone.
I've used such converters before (all they really are is a SATA<->IDE bridge chip on a board with requisite connectors) and they don't seem to take much of a hit in terms of bandwidth availability. Granted I've yet to use one on a PS2 but with the XBox I've got sitting here with one you'd swear there wasn't a hit at all.
Yes, as stated in the tutorial, it was an IDE2SAT model from StarTech. Formatting was instant under Lord Bogami's GUI (connected to PC). Under uLaunchELF... about two or three minutes, but I got a "format failed" message at the end. But speedwise on the PS2, it behaves exactly like an ordinary IDE HDD, with no reduction in performance. I've been playing MGS3 for a few hours and I've been happy.
This is the one I've been using: http://cgi.ebay.com/SATA-PATA-IDE-A...637?pt=LH_DefaultDomain_0&hash=item4aa465a0d5 On an XBox it feels a bit flimsy and clearly would be easy to break but given the average person rarely needs to open their XBox once everything is setup you're fine. I've been contemplating ways to modify a retail PS2 Network Adapter in hopes of getting them to close flush but so far the only idea I've come up with is to use a 2.5" SATA drive instead of 3.5". Clearly size restrictions aren't really an issue there but you will need something to hold the drive in place unless you're fine with it bouncing around inside a metal cage. The other possibility would be to remove the IDE connector from the PS2 adapter and the pinset on the IDE->SATA converter while soldering a pin header directly to the converter and the PS2 adapter. Would shave off about 1/4" which would probably be more than enough but of course would completely destroy your ability to use that adapter with anything except a SATA drive. I recall those SATA only "network adapters" being found on Deal Extreme, can't say I trust them.
So you used one of the generic eBay adapters? To be honest I'm surprised that it even works... most reports seem to say that they are absolute garbage. I had once considered doing this mod on an SCPH-30004 (regular expansion bay type) PS2, but like you say it's very hard to get the SATA-IDE adapter and 3.5 HDD to fit well, even after hacking away at the network adapter. So I had to reconsider, and decided to try it on an SCPH-10000... which was actually the main reason I bought it to be honest.
Just thought that I should add, if you're going to get an HDD over 1TB, ensure that it uses the 512 byte sector format, to prevent any potential problems... most of them are using 4 kb sectors these days, which probably will not work. This influenced my choice of HDD... the Hitachi Deskstar HDS5C3020ALA632 (2 TB), since it is one of the few remaining 2 TB HDDs still using the 512 sector format.
