I use a cheap Chinese no name one. Works 100% in my socket 7 machine although I did touch up the soldering before using it.

Thinks for the info!

Are there any none cheap Chinese ones? 🤣 I'm putting it in a high-end piii-s system and would not like to skimp.

Honestly, I don't think any major company ever designed and manufactured these things. They are so simple that your fine with off the shelf / no name parts and production. I've been using a dozen no name, made in China adaptors the past couple of years and never had any problems or performance issues I can link to them. I'd just say buy a few and try them. It's about the only part of a retro build that you shouldn't need to worry about skimping on.

How do they handle raid setups?

I prefer sata/ide adapters that have a master/slave jumper. A few times I had to set the jumper one way or the other in order to operate properly when more than 1 hard drive was connected to the ide cable. I'm not sure of the real cause but having the jumper gives you more flexibility.

I've never seen one without master/slave jumpers. I guess if those are out there, then the OP should skip them. Good call tincup.

As for raid, I don't see how they would interfere. All they are really doing is changing the interface from PATA to SATA and supplying power. But using a modern HDD via this method should pretty much saturate your IDE channel anyway. Unless you want to go with a RAID card in your PCI bus, you won't get much more speed. If you need it for mirroring, then you are just gonna have to keep trying IDE or SATA based PCI cards until you find one that boots correctly.

Converters are available from the likes of Startech, although I can't vouch for those. Also, I'm not sure if they count as a "major player".

I know of at least 4 ICs for these converters: Marvell 88SA8040, 88SA8052, JMicron JM20330 and SunplusIt SPIF223a. There are many noname chips that, according to forum posts, have questionable reliability. They are usually smaller than ones mentioned above, and converter with "bad" chip looks like this:

Personally I used converters based on JM20330 and SPIF223a and had no trouble with them. Marvell could be hard to obtain. Also note that adapter with single chip and 2 SATA connectors is just bi-directional and does not support two drives at once. If you want to use both master and slave IDE devices, then look for converter with 2 ICs.

http://www.msfn.org/board/topic/152483-sata-t … s-whichwhatwhy/

Thanks kokornov for that MSFN thread reference!

I've found a few sources for the Marvell-based adapters and they're $20-25 a piece though they do seem to be the most solid out of the bunch. For the time being I've found another cheaper source for the JMicron JM20330 ones with clear pictures which I can use as proof with ebay's moneyback guarantee.

From my search, listings from aliexpress that mentioned that JMicron chip are either sold-out or looking shady (mixed pictures or unclear what the chip is). There's also one that says "Marvell 8040" but upon looking the chip, there are visual differences (missing text and slightly off layout) to the one on the known IOI IDESATA-07 adapters. Just in case anyone is looking/searching: be cautious.

I've considered getting a SATA CD-RW drive for my legacy build with an adapter, but it has to have jumpers on it, because I have 2x HDD on primary IDE, and then the CD-ROM and ZIP250 on Secondary IDE. Any thoughts?

Maybe you would be better off just buying a PATA SSD. You keep your factory IDE, but move to solid state read/write speed. Obviously, the throughput doesn't matter because it's going to saturate your bus just like the SATA drives.