I would like to share my findings with the Delock 62495 MSATA>44pin IDE adapter.

The adapter itself was installed in my trusty Medion MD9783 P4 laptop in combination with a Kingston SUV500MS 120gb MSATA SSD.

TEST LAPTOP SPECS
Medion Titanium MD 9783
Intel Pentium 4 2.0Ghz Northwood S478 512k L2
2x 256 MB DDR266
ATi Mobility Radeon M6 32MB, integrated
i845D-based board with ICH2
Avance AC'97 Audio - ALC 201, integrated
DVD-RW, connected to second IDE channel as master (Channel 1)

THE ADAPTER
The Delock 62495 MSATA>44pin IDE adapter costs roughly 38 Euros - or 40 US dollars.

Official Specifications:
• Connectors:
1 x IDE 44 pin male
1 x mSATA slot (full size)
• Form factor: 2.5″
• For 3.3 V mSATA module
• Supports ATA/ATAPI-7 (ATA-133)
• Supports ATA/ATAPI Ultra DMA mode
• Supports ATA/ATAPI PIO mode
• Jumper for selecting Master / Slave and Cable Select
• Latch for mSATA module, full size can fit in

UNBOXING AND SETUP

https://imgur.com/a/OXQXQQO

The Box itself comes with the packaging you would expect from Delock, nothing fancy, but good enough.
Screws for installing the adapter in a 2.5" HDD bay are included, the SSD itself does not require screws to be installed on the adapter.
The SSD is simply inserted from above with a slight angle into the MSATA connector, and then pushed down. The clip closes once the SSD has been pushed down completely, and the adapter is ready for installation.

Master/Slave/Cable Select is controlled via 4 pins that are clearly separated from the other 44 pins.
The pins are numbered from 1-48, 45-48 being the jumper setting pins. Leaving the four last pins unjumpered leaves the drive set to Master, which should be normal in most laptops.

After installing the adapter with the SSD, started the laptop and checked the BIOS. It shows that the full capacity of the SSD is detected.

PARTITIONING, WINDOWS INSTALL, AND PROBLEMS

WINDOWS 9X/ME
I first attempted to partition the SSD via DISKPART,
however Windows 98 SE failed to boot (after finishing the DOS file copy stage), hanging with the following:

Write fault error writing to device PRN
Abort, Retry, Ignore, Fail?

I don't know why it hung, considering the device PRN is supposed to access a printer.

Safe Mode did not work either, hanging with same error.
Config.sys and Autoexec.bat are therefore not culprits.

I eventually moved on, deleting all partitions and the MBR, and partitioned via W98 FDISK.
Nevertheless, never had I witnessed FORMAT.COM doing a full format on a 20gb primary partition in less than a minute before.

Just like on the first attempt, I copied the WIN98 folder from the CD to the freshly formatted partition.

Even though I partitioned via FDISK, I still wasn't able to boot WIN98SE after the file copy stage.
This time however, I had a different error:

1Error loading USER.EXE

I also had this error trying to boot Safe Mode.

I reformatted and reinstalled three times, to no avail, with the same error every time:

1Error loading USER.EXE

I eventually gave up on 98SE, deleting the MBR and partitioning this from the WinME CD.

I then copied the WIN9X folder from the CD to the hard drive, as usual, and then ran setup from the hard drive.

Just like with Win98SE, the copy file stage went without any problems.

However, upon the first restart, WinME hung after the splash screen with the following:

1Please wait while Setup updates your configuration files
2This may take a few minutes...

I waited for 5 minutes, but nothing happened and there was no drive activity at all.
Safe Mode led to the exact error, albeit Windows hanging at a never ending splash screen.
I didn't check the bootlog.txt, though.

https://imgur.com/a/KGyttvB

I eventually gave up Win9x entirely after partitioning, formatting, and installing Win98SE and ME a total of six times.

WINDOWS 2000
I installed Windows 2000 as usual by booting from the CD, partitioning and installing from setup.
Unlike Windows 9x/Me, installation was as bliss as it could get.

Even though Windows 2000 setup does not support quick formatting, the full format of the 20gb partition I created took less then a minute, showing the speed of the SSD.

Setup went as you would expect. The install was completed within 10 minutes, and I noticed no problems before and after installing the drivers.

DMA Mode 5 was supported out of the box by Windows 2000 SP4.

Boot time was roughly 25 seconds.

WINDOWS XP

XP setup was done in the same fashion of 2000.

The setup had an error however copying BOOTFONT.BIN,
which is required for displaying East Asian characters in the NTLDR bootloader and in the text mode setup phase. Fortunately, the file was more or less unimportant, and the error didn't happen again when I installed XP again on the SSD, so the CD probably was a bit dusty and the error wasn't something to worry about.

XP RTM supported DMA Mode 5 out of the box, and an upgrade to Service Pack 3 enabled DMA Mode 6.

Boot time was very close to the of 2000, roughly 25 seconds.

WINDOWS 7

Just for experimental reasons, I attempted to install Windows 7 SP1, despite the 512mb RAM, purely to see how Win7 would perform on 512mb with a relatively fast pagefile.

I tried to install booting from the DVD, but setup kept failing while "expanding files", throwing an error message. I then tried to copy the files to the hard drive, running setup from XP SP3, however this gave me error messages as well when attempting to run setup.exe.

However, the DVD turned out to be damaged, and I booted from another Win7 (SP1) DVD, copying the files to the hard drive and then running setup directly from the drive.
This turned out to be successful, and the setup took a total of 40 minutes to complete.

After installing drivers (which were meant for XP) I was surprised how well Win7 ran. Startup from completed POST to Desktop took no more than 40 seconds, something I would have never expected considering the low amount of RAM.

I ran the Experience Index with a result of 1,0 due to the ATi Mobility Radeon M6 which only supported DirectX 7.0. All the other components with the exception of the SSD got a score of 1,9 , the SSD got a ridiculously high result of 6,5, due to it being faster than any hard drive.

Memory usage idled between 45 - 55 % at desktop, which was very interesting.
Considering the specs, Win7 ran reasonably "quick" - it felt like running Win98 on a DX4 w/ 24mb.

Even though Win7 ran somewhat ok on these specs, I still feel that WinXP is better for the machine.

DMA Mode 6 was supported out of box by Win7 SP1.

DRIVE OPTIMIZATIONS
Due to the complete lack of TRIM, I took some precautions to keep the SSD healthy.

First, I left a small part of the SSD (10gb from 120gb) unpartitioned, as part of overprovisioning.

Second, I realigned the the SSD to 4k via shrinking the first partition by a few mb from a bootable GParted CD. GParted automatically corrects the partition when shrinking partitions from the left to right.

After a reboot, Windows XP/Vista/7 DISKPART shows the alignment of the SSD with

1list disk
2sel disk n
3list part

(n stands for the drive number of your SSD, should be 0 in most cases)

If the the offset is divisible by 1024, then the partition is aligned correctly.

BENCHMARKS

https://imgur.com/a/sCi25N3

The Kingston SUV500MS/120G SSD used in this test is a TLC SSD which can be bought new on Ebay for roughly $34 even though it is no longer being produced.
According to Kingston, it is capable of up to 520mb/s reading and 320mb/s writing sequential.

However, the ATAPI bus supports an absolute maximum of 133mb/s, which makes the maximum speeds of the SSD irrelevant.

I used CrystalDIskMark 2.2.0p in 2000, XP, and 7.

Seqeuntial read speeds were practically same in 2000 SP4 and XP RTM due to DMA Mode 5 bottlenecking the maximum speed to roughly 90mb/s.
XP SP3 and 7 SP1 performed slighly better with a bit over 100mb/s in sequential reads due to DMA Mode 6.

Interestingly, speeds of over 100mb/s are achieved according to CrystalDiskMark, even though the laptop's chipset (i845) with its ICH2 southbridge should be technically limited to DMA Mode 5, so 100mb/s.

Even though there is a 10mb/s difference in sequential reads between DMA Mode 5 and 6, there is practically no difference while normal usage. The SSD is much faster than any hard drive in practice, and the biggest difference between a conventional hard drive from a reputable company and a SSD is the random write performance, which will make most of the performance difference in Windows. The SSD with the adapter performs roughly 40x faster in 4k random writes compared to the 80gb 5400rpm Hitachi which I had installed before.

CONCLUSION

The Delock 62495 adapter proves itself to be quite a performer, but there are two problems which might scare somebody from buying it for their old system.

The smaller problem is its asking price. There is no doubt that Delock adapters usually are quality components, this one being no exception, and the performance of the adapter when in combination with a SSD from a reputable company is practically unbeatable on any older ATAPI/IDE-only system, its price of $40 is very high for such an adapter.

The bigger and much more worse problem however is the the complete incompatibility with Windows 9x/Me for reasons that are unknown.
Technically speaking, it doesn't have to be the adapter necessarily - but I have tested Win9x/Me on many different 2.5" hard drives which worked fine without any problems at all. This leaves us with either the adapter or the SSD - it is more likely that the adapter, which is responsible for converting from SATA to ATA, is the culprit.

However, as mentioned, Windows NT-based operating systems seem to work great with the adapter.

So, is the Delock 62495 adapter the right choice for you?

If you plan on running solely Windows NT-based operating systems such as 2000, XP, etc., well then the $40 may very well be worth it.

But if you consider running Win9x/Me, you are better off trying another adapter, an IDE SSD (very overpriced), or maybe just sticking to a hard drive, which would be more period accurate anyways.

If anyone has also tested this or another MSATA -> 44pin IDE adapter, please let me know!