Just thought I'd share that we have another option for SATA on these older pre-SATA systems. I've been trying to find a way to boot from CD without using IDE at all, and this has been the next step.

Two points of note though, in a Star Tech PCI-E 1x to PCI card, it wouldn't see/report any connected drives. However, in a Sedna PCI-E 16x to PCI adapter it works perfectly. I had set up Win2k with a Sil3114-based card, added this one in to install the driver in Windows, switched the drives over to it and it boots up just fine.

One thing that has still eluded me however is that per Adaptec's own website, the 1220SA supports booting from optical drives (El Torito CD-ROM boot standard), and claims that it will automagically prioritize optical drive boot over fixed disk boot if present:

ATAPI Support The following devices are supported: ● The 1225SA and 1220SA supports detection of SATA ATAPI TAPE Drive and CDROM […]
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ATAPI Support
The following devices are supported:
● The 1225SA and 1220SA supports detection of SATA ATAPI TAPE Drive and CDROM.
● The 1225SA and 1220SA supports booting from the ELTORITO bootable CD/DVD media.
If a bootable CD/DVD media is detected, that bootable media gets precedence in the booting
order.

I have not yet managed to get it to boot from a CD though - it doesn't seem to even check the drive for bootable media despite detecting it correctly (I have the DVD-RW drive on SATA port 0 and SSD on port 1).

These cards are fairly cheap on ebay, I picked one up new in box for $20, and they are truly SATA II speeds and it seems a bit faster than the Sil3114 cards I've tried. It has a Sil3132CNU chip, which seems to be what most of the cheap PCI-E SATA II cards use so I'm still searching for a Windows 9x driver as well. Adaptec has one for Windows 2000 and onward, but not Me, 98SE etc.