The most common need will likely be converting old drives to use with newer systems, considering Intel’s efforts to eliminate the older Ultra ATA standard. For a paltry $7, you can carry all the old hard disk drives over from your old Ultra ATA systems into your new Serial ATA system, or even use it with your computer to rescue data from your friend’s hard disk drives.

Notice we keep repeating those three magic words, "Hard Disk Drive", and with good reason: This adapter will not physically fit most optical drives (CD, DVD, etc) because its power connector end blocks the optical drive’s power plug.

Hard drives normally escape this problem by having additional room between the data and power connector, the overhanging portion covering "master/slave" jumpers instead of the power connector.

As a result, we were unable to test the LA-USDE07 on any optical drives, but had no compatibility issues with several hard drives we tested. The one persistent compatibility issue involved detection issues with our Asus P5B Deluxe-WiFi/AP motherboard, forcing us to use a 975X chipset board for testing.

The results:

Little to no performance loss was found in SiSoft Sandra 2005 using the adapter rather than a native SATA controller, except in buffered writes.

HD Tach RW gives us more information via a graphical display showing writes capped at approximately 65MB/s. That’s fast enough to exceed the actual performance of most existing Ultra ATA hard drives, since only more recent drives have been able to beat this performance level.

The LA-USDE07 played well with several of our 975X and earlier technology on-board controllers, but its incompatibility with our P965 sample board makes us question its capability to be paired with the latest technology. We therefore recommend this part only for use with previous-generation controllers; at least until a compatibility list has been established.