I ordered some of those exact doodads to try with SSDs and hard drives. I will try an optical drive too. Will be here today or tomorrow.

Yes they do work!

I also tried the other adapter, the one that goes directly into the IDE port and has two SATA connectors at the other end.

Only issue: SATA drives don't have analogue CD Audio out. So it's usually not a solution for DOS and early Windows 98 Games.

I know on MYCE (was CDFREAKS) the non-RAID SIL based SATA cards are highly regarded for optical drives - while converters are not recommended for writers

swaaye wrote:

I ordered some of those exact doodads to try with SSDs and hard drives. I will try an optical drive too. Will be here today or tomorrow.

Any update?

philscomputerlab wrote:

Yes they do work!

I also tried the other adapter, the one that goes directly into the IDE port and has two SATA connectors at the other end.

Only issue: SATA drives don't have analogue CD Audio out. So it's usually not a solution for DOS and early Windows 98 Games.

Good to know. Hopefully this means I can just get a new optical drive for my 845 build, vs living with the older (and super-duper loud) drives I have in the bin. Any preference to which kind of adapter to go with?

Matth79 wrote:

I know on MYCE (was CDFREAKS) the non-RAID SIL based SATA cards are highly regarded for optical drives - while converters are not recommended for writers

I do have such a Sil card, but I don't have a spare PCI slot for it. Good to know about writers, but I'm not sure that will be a problem for my usage. 😊

No preference, they all have the same handful of chips from JMicron or SunPlus.

Because they are so cheap I would recommend getting different types. If you prefer to use the SATA power cables you can get one of these dual SATA adapters that go directly into the IDE port on the motherboard.

I used one in this video for optical and platter storage: http://youtu.be/qALaCKzeaTo?t=11m6s

I saw complaints about the Sunplus chip. There are some big threads out there about these adapter boards.

The Jmicron adapters seem solid. I've spent a few hours with a Micron C400 SSD connected to one jacked into VIA 686A IDE and it has been rock solid and seems to be performing as it should. 40MB/s on 686A, which is the most you can expect from that IDE controller.

Some J Micron adapters don't support optical drives, only HDDs. But if it says DVD or CD-ROM in the title it's probably okay.