Thanks Chipzilla and Richard,
I only need to be able to connect SATA HDDs to a IDE-only motherboard to test customers' drives - I have one here that doesn't want to boot up on a Dell so I just need to access it to backup the data (if poss) before I format it and re-install windows.
So I bought a relatively inexpensive SATA adapter card (made by MRi UK ltd) - it happens to handle RAID 0+1, which is something I'd like to go towards one day, hence kill two birds with one stone kinda thing. Would that tend to cause data errors Richard or are you talking about cable converters?
Your thoughts appreciated, as always.
Cheers
Charles