Christmas in May, Muvo FM TX, PATA to USB adapter

I went nuts. I decided to have an early Christmas.
I have been wanting a portable MP3 player for a long time to replace my broken Rio (first-gen MP3 player). Nothing caught my eyes in terms of price-feature ratio until I happened upon an ad for Creative MuVo FM TX 1GB for $57.50. That's a great buy as other stores were still selling it for about $100+. I bought it.
I also bought a USB-PATA adapter. It is this small adapter you attached to the back of an IDE drive. On the other side of the plug is a wire with a USB connector.
I wanted to move the DVDRW drive out from secondary IDE which was shared with another hard drive. The hard drive contained my /usr volume. Burning a DVD would cause frequent jerkiness in interactive session. The cheap solution to that is to either buy a PATA to SATA adapter or PATA to USB adapter.
I tried the PATA to SATA adapter first primarily because my motherboard had two SATA ports and they had never been used. I bought the adapter from EBay. It arrived a month later from China. Opening the package, I found that adapter wrapped in a non-anti-static plastic bag. Uh oh.
I detached all my disks and use an old 3GB hard drive for experimentation with this PATA-SATA adapter. Based on my reading the hard drive must be set to master. When I turned on the computer, the light on the adapter shone green. Since this was going to be my first SATA device, I tried booting with Knoppix 4.2 which boasted a large number of drivers. It was not recognised. The SATA controller, SiS964, was recognised, but not the attached device. Not being familiar with SATA handling in Linux, and not having a real SATA device to verify against, I chose not to pursue this path any further, at least until I have a real SATA device.
So, I bought a non-brand-name USB-PATA adapter. Supposedly it presents the hard disk as a USB Mass Storage device, which Linux has been supporting since last century.
There was no problem. I burned a DVD without having The adapter worked and it could pump data from and to the DVDRW at 20MBps without me noticing any jerkiness in interactive session.
I'm enjoying this early Christmas.

(originally from http://microjet.ath.cx/WebWiki/2006.05.20_ChristmasInMay.html)