Maybe I was not lucky with the ones I got but I had problems with some sata to ide adapters. One ended with melted psu wires... other two I tried got broken without reasons. I think that the whole "direct connection" solution without some basic case support for the weight the whole solution have plus "not the best soldering" is often a problem.

You're not alone with this. I once had the same issue as you. I found out that a flashlight (a pocket lamp) can be helpful here:
Hold it under the PCB and you'll see all traces clearly! Then, just keep looking for short circuits. They are usally near the connectors or chips..

The last SATA /IDE converter I used was okay, though. I bought it for my old Mac and it worked. It was one of the "one way" models, without a switch.
It simply attaches to the SATA HDD. But I can't say whether this is a good model or not, 'cause I'm a newbie at this, afterall. The chip's name is JM20330.

I also attached two pix for you, maybe they can be helpful (sorry for the bad quality 🙁 ).

I did some touching up with my adapter before installation, but it's been solid since then.

Orkay wrote:

The Ultra33 card also allowed my 486 to work with a CF card, something not all onboard IDE controllers will cooperate with.

Interesting. I picked up a CF IDE (Startech) reader in 2010, and my Pentium 100 cannot cold boot with it. I always have to boot and immediately press reset in order to not have it hang when listing the IDE devices during POST.

Im wondering how much faster will become my 462 machine using sata HDD or even an SSD, but don`t have other SSD then mine on main pc...
From what i have heard old computers can become fast as hell with SSD, bcuz no matter the age and generation of the hardware the HDD will be always the slowest part....

Even a modern mechanical SATA HDD via an ATA adapter offers significant performance improvements due to improved seek times and high transfer rates.

How much will such an old machine benefit at all.
More than ATA-66 would be ludicrus compared to the rest of bus speeds inside the system.
Nothing against using what is around.
There basically a couple of solutions:

• Native IDE HDDs (Supported natively, but drives are loud, usually used, not the fastest and old, which bring certains risks with failure)
• SATA HDDs with an adapter (No native support, might bring incompatability. Usually very fast. Issues with big drives >4 GiB/>32 GiB/>128 GiB)
• CF cards (Runs natively through IDE adapters, limited write cycles, usually very fast response and good transfer rates)
• Other flash cards (Would need an adapter to IDE, limited write cycles, very fast response and usually good transfer rates)

In he end, it depends on the use.

• On DOS I'd think native IDE or CF cards should be the easiest. Few write cycles ensure the longevity of the flash cells, and small drives are easy to find.
• For Windows 9x I'd go with either type of hard drive. the IDE drives run natively and the SATA drives will need an adapter. But both shoud run fine, especially when limited to smaller storage. And the systems usually actually benefit from such fast drives.