I have had zero luck with jemplode and v3a11. Frankly, I'm just not sure the two are compatible. When I try to sync even like two songs with jemplode and v3a11, it crashes and the unit reports sigkill and segfault errors. Is there a specific reason you want to run v3 instead of v2?

Techincally, yes. You can use a SATA-IDE adapter, but it won't work very well with actual 2.5" SATA drives properly mounted to the drive tray, because there won't be any room at the interface for the adapter. There's barely enough room for the IDE cable already. I took the opportunity to upgrade to an SSD, so I got a 256GB mSATA card, dropped it into a JMicron mSATA-IDE bridge adapter and run that. People here have had good just with JMicron adapters versus others like Marvell.