These things never work!

Yes they do! And better than on board IDE! That's right! My motherboards had constantly problems with identifiying ide drives if I wanted quickly add something, the nightmare of all the master/slave settings cable select and all that garbage. I plugged that to my sata and bam! works almost every time. Almost being you have to remember which sata port you need to use on the adapter itself (there is 2)

They work... when they're not DOA.

I'll usually buy 3 or 4 at a time and at least one of them doesn't work (same system, just swapping 'em back and forth). In principle that seems terrible but the bang for the buck is still good so long as you order a few more than you really need.

I got similar product from Meritline before and it works ok with older system that come with no SATA port. I even modified some old time NAS system ( IDE only) to take SATA drive. But I never try the other way: Convert IDE drive to use on SATA port.

In for 1

Yes, They do work.. I bought a case of these when they were 1.49 each with RED SATA CABLE..

never used these before. Curious how these fit dimension-wise. In for 3