StarTech.comSATA IDE Adapter - SATA IDE Adapter - Bi-Directional - IDE to SATA Adapter (PATA2SATA3)

There's one gotcha with this product - it needs its own power supply. At first sight it looks like a simple adapter so it's easy not to put the right number of cables in and then nothing works. When it's powered up there's a red internal LED that shines through the casing so you know that at least you've got that right. :-)I used this for connecting an old IDE hard drive to a modern SATA board. I simply plugged the side of the connector with lots of holes into the end of the hard drive with lots of pins. Then I plugged one end of the modern SATA cable into a spare slot in the motherboard and the other end into the equivalent slot in the converter.The next gotcha was that for some reason I assumed that with a cable going into the converter the hard drive would somehow magically pick up its own power supply from the fresh air. Wrong. I forgot to connect a power cable to the hard drive too.Fortunately there's a cable included. One end with four holes (or pins, can't remember which) went into a spare cable connection from the motherboard and the other end divided into two different types of cable - one of these went into the converter to power the converter and one went into the hard drive to power the hard drive.So that was simple. I changed the jumper setting on the hard drive to 'Cable select' (search for your hard drive make and model + jumper settings + image) and everything worked (you can search for 'Cable Select' too but it's not very enlightening unless you're an electrician).The included instructions are bare bone (and don't include the referenced image of DIP switch settings as others have pointed out though in my case I didn't need them). With hindsight I can see they're all there but they're semi-geeky so I hope my version helps. :-)

Allowed me to use my older pata dvd rewriter dvr109 on windows 11 pc saving it from landfill - great product and easy to fit and get working. Set everything to master and it's really just plugnplay

Had hoped for better. Intended purpose was to connect old IDE/PATA drives to SATA controllers so as to avoid using old controller cards. Connection of the adapter was easy and it worked straightaway. However, on the old controller cards, these disks manage about 50MB/s read and 45MB/s write for large sustained writes (too big to cache). On the Bi-Directional SATA IDE Adapter Converter, write speeds were less than a tenth of that at 2-4MB/s. Tried on 3 different disks; setting disks as cable select or master made no difference. Position of switches on the adapter (which are inadequately described on the instruction sheet) made no difference. Not fit for purpose as these disks are used for backup of system images (30-60GB). Might just about be adequate for low workloads with small (cacheable) files if desperate.

I'd previously tried two other similar but cheaper devices to use two IDE HDDs on a SATA board, but after trying every possible combination (jumpers set to slave, master or no jumpers at all, also tried all SATA ports), the bios wasn't detecting the HDDs.I then opted for two of these converters and voila, they worked first time. I even bought a splitter cable because I only have two spare molex connections from my PSU and you need one for each HDD and one for each of these converters, but I needn't have bothered. They've even thought of that, each converter comes with a molex 1 to 2 splitter lead.

A good product that comes with an inconvenient issue that is not really the fault of its makers.Many smartphone/phone makers have moved to micro-USB to charge devices. Here's the problem; with micro-USB the phone has to be absolutely flush with the charging base or no charge can pass (I had a problem seating a Sony Experia handset). Phone makers also orient the micro-USB differently which means you have to attach them left to right on this base or right to left. Not a major issue but it gets annoying having to swap the iDapt socket in an out of the front or rear port so the device can lie flat on the base.Finally, there's the issue of needing more than one socket because so many devices charge through micro-USB. With the iDapt you can either buy a second adaptor or buy a short USB-to micro-USB cable and use the side charging port. The company should really sell this with two micro-USB adaptors.

If you've been using computers for a few years, you may have usable IDE hard drives that could be used as backup on a SATA motherboard if they could be interfaced. This adapter allows you to do that and, it will also connect SATA hard drives to an IDE motherboard. It comes with a SATA cable and a Molex to floppy cable to power the adapter. It works well with a WD Caviar Blue UATA 6. The only issue I had was installing it in a Fractal Design case where the HDDs fit crossways, as the adapter and SATA cable press hard into the acoustic lining adjacent to the motherboard.Data transmission is 133Mb/s for IDE and 1.5 Gb/s for SATA, although it is compatible with SATA 1, 2, and 3.The printed installation guide can be a bit of a mystery if you're connecting a SATA hard drive to an IDE motherboard, as it refers to DIP switches and a setting diagram; however that diagram is not on the sheet. It is on the sheet that can be downloaded from the StarTech web site. So my IDE hard drives will continue to be useful. Now if I could only find a use for the gigabytes of memory that I've collected over the years!