There is no SATA adapter. There are six SATA ports on the motherboard. The DVD burner gets one, internal hard drives get three others, and a short SATA cable connected to an external socket gets a fifth SATA port. The external SATA drive plugs into that socket by means of a four-foot long SATA cable. There are no electronics between the drive and the motherboard. Well, except that really isn't the case, because the drive sits in the NexStar dock, and I don't know what (if any) electronics are inside it. There must be some because it has a power switch (external wall-wart power supply) and pretty blue LEDs that light up when it is powered up. It connects through either USB or SATA, but as far as I know there are no drivers or software of any kind associated with it. I think it is just a box with the right kind of connectors built into it to power the drive and connect the data, but I don't know for sure.

tanstaafl.