In my sysadmin work, it would be useful to me to have one of those bare-hard drive docking station deals, but they only work with SATA drives. This lack of IDE support is understandable with 3.5" IDE drives, since there's no physical connector placement standard. But there is such a standard for 2.5" IDE drives. Regardless, no one seems to make one.

But it seems like someone ought to make a 44-pin 2.5" IDE HDD to SATA port adapter. I have found a few that do this, but they fail to conform to the placement standards for SATA connectors, and, often and more importantly, don't deal with the SATA power connection at all.

Does anyone know of such an adapter? Or, really, any other way to conveniently deal with 2.5" laptop hard drives? I know I can get a USB interface, and there's (usually) enough power coming from the USB port to power the hard drive. But I'd really like a faster interface, and there doesn't seem to be any reason I couldn't use a correct adapter to plug the IDE drive into a SATA dock that's connected to the computer via an eSATA connection and get decent speeds. Except for that that correct adapter doesn't exist.

If I can't find one, I'm thinking about getting a board designer friend of mine to make one for me. But I'd rather just buy one.