Trouble "Plug & Play", good workmanship

The motherboards available today lacks usually the parallel port (P-ATA and IDE can be used interchangeably herein), so that either an additional controller card (via the PCI or PCI-E interface of the mainboard) connected, an external quick-change adapter (USB) or a converter adapter as this must be used in order to use older devices.

I had initially opted for Option 1, the PCI controller card (15,90 EUR at a major electronics retailer). Thus my two IDE devices could operate. However, this is a compromise solution:
- Additional boot time during the BIOS initialization (about 4 seconds) - as usual, have IDE controller has its own "BIOS", which recognizes the drives when booting the PC and integrates.
- Additional drivers needed (. Eg when Windows installation)

These disadvantages do not point to the adapter. Due to the principle will be recognized over connected devices than conventional SATA devices. Here each drive manufacturer retains its name and also his performance. My hard drive is for example. Identified as S-ATA 1.5-device (theoretical throughput 150 MB / s).

Use each of these adapters, you can bring the drives to move again. Should you check before the pinout of the hard disk (it must be set to master). When the DVD drive, it was the controller in my case, no matter that this "Cable Select (CS)" was set.

It is important that for the adapter, an additional 4-pin 12V power connector is required. I suspect the adapter takes a very low power (~ 1 W). For me at least several hard drives and adapters are connected to a cable.

One S-ATA cable is not supplied, even this is needed.

Tests:
Data transfer of large files (of 20 MB, total 85GB) IDE hard drive (Samsung SP2514N 250 GB) to S-ATA hard disk composite (2 x Samsung HD103SJ 1TB, RAID 1) and the other way around: about 50-55 MB / s. This is within the power values ​​of the IDE hard disk ([...]).

Functionality:
Previous Windows 7 boot from IDE hard drive, no problem.
Windows 7 and Windows 8 Preview: no problems.
Ripping Audio CDs with Audiograbber: no problem, the DVD drive is detected.