SATA Adapters Review.
Andy sorry for the delay in writing this. You where aware of the HD issues I had in getting the 4200 up to 8T (4x2T).
There is a slight mod that needs to be done to have clearance for the SATA adapters IDE cable from main board to adapters. Nothing major, just removing the plastic base that holds the din connector pins in alignment while the cards are made, and shorten the pins about 1/8". This gives clearance for the connector to clear. As you can see in the photo below it's a tight fit but is compact enough for the sleds to work.
I purchased several sets of the SATA converts for my 4500, 4200 and spare 4500. The 4200 has been upgraded to a 2.4 ghz P4 so it's now a 4500. The 4200 has 1.5gig of ram as well as one of my 4500. The remaining 4500 has 1 gig of ram with my WD RE drives. I bought 5 2T Seagage ST32000542AS 5900 rpm drives, 1 for a spare. Because these are were going into servers I needed to fully test the HD's. Besides these have a history of being bad right out of the box if you read the reviews. But at $70 each for a 2T drive the price was hard to beat. I used MHDD to perform the low-level format and verify of the drives. Any failing verify were deemed as being bad, the SMART technology should have detected the bad sections during the format and block those out. I used the SATA adapters for this process of formatting and verifying the HD's. I figured the continuous hammering of the 8.5hr to format + 6.5 hr to verify the drive would be a good initial test. I did a clean install of the GOS once a new HD was loaded. I then hot swapped the remaining 3 HD's in. All 4 HD were recognized and mounted for the GOS to use. I then started the long 24 hr raid 5 build. All went well till I started transferring data the next day. I had 2 HD dropout of the array as soon as the process started, drive 2 and 4 which are on the same controller. This took some time to trouble shoot, it's not often you have 2 HD's fail at the same time. It ended up being 2 HD's that were bad and had to be RMA for replacements. The 2 replacement HD's came in and went through the long process of formatting and verifying the HD surface again using the SATA adapters. The 2 replacement tested good. So I was back to setting the 4200 back up. Started to mount the HD's and 2 were not recognized and failed instantly, different slots. It happen to be 2 HD's from the original 5 order. Furthering testing of the HD's indicated that indeed they had failed. So I had to RMA those HD's. This made 4 out of 5 HD's received on my original order were bad, talking about bad luck. I had 3 working HD now, so while I waited for the replacements I decide to build a 3 disk RAID 5 array. This 3 disk array formatted and RAID 5 array built without any issue. I then started doing data migration from my other servers, data dump taking up to 20 hr including verify. My other servers use the 7200 rpm HD's and could not keep up with the Seagate 5900rpm SATA HD's. All data migration was done through my Dlink DGS-1216T GigE Switch. Transfer speed averaged around 20-24Mb/s between serves. 2 week later I received the 2 replacement HD's and one of those where physically damaged. It looked like a HD had been dropped on another HD, denting the top case cover preventing the heads from moving. So I had to call CS again and tell them that they sent me a DOA drive that was physically damaged and should have never been sent. They paid for shipping this time. But now I had enough HD to build a 4 disk array. So after testing the newly arrived HD I was set to build my array for use. All HD's were wiped clean again, new install of the GOS was used. Hot swapped all HD's once the GOS was running on the new 2T drives. Did data migrating from my other servers with no problems. The server with SATA HD's indicated to be faster than the IDE HD's. I wiped the disk array several times during my testing and in all cases NO problems what so ever showed up. The server has now been up for just over 1 month now, without any issues.
Conclusion:
These SATA adapters are rock solid. Having continuously hammer these for days at a time I have 100% confidence that these are a very good option to expand your capacity without replacing your servers to the newer models.