Sometimes it is necessary to use a IDE (PATA) drive in a system that has only SATA features. This is quite possible to achieve and works well with hard drives and optical disk drives. I know of only one particular converter that is small enough to be practical and needs no drivers and/or operational problems. I run Win7 64-bit with a 4.6GHz i7-3770K CPU and 32GB memory. There are two legacy IDE drives with SATA to IDE converters, a Plextor PX-708A optical drive and a Mitsubishi Super floppy disk drive. I keep the 708 since it has some features not found in the newer optical drives and the Super floppy disk drive is compatible with the 1.4MB disks but it also writes and reads super 120MB floppies. A few of my customers still use floppies to enter programs and data into their industrial systems.
If anyone is interested, send me an email and I'll provide the necessary information.
The adaptor that I use is very small and installs on the rear of a drive. It plugs into the IDE socket. The adaptor measurements are 2.250" wide, 0.940" high, and maximum protrusion is 0.750". It needs connection to a power supply and the SATA bus.
