I found this very nice adapter on Cyberguys web site for less than $30. It supports both 3.5″ and 2.5″ IDE and SATA drives. I’ve used it so far on a 2.5″ IDE notebook and I only had to use the adapter. I guess the drive pulled power over the USB connection. The kit also includes an external power brick for IDE drives, with an adapter to support power to SATA drives. The IDE data connections are right on the adapter; there is a SATA data cable that plugs into a male SATA connection on top of the adapter with the other side connecting to the SATA drive.
I have found IDE to USB external adapters useful for copying data from PCs with bad drives or which won’t boot or work properly. It’s a lot better solution than having to connect the drive physically to another PC to copy the data to, which I had done in the past.
I had previously been using two different IDE drive containers from CompUSA for this purpose, but they took longer to setup, were separate, and did not support SATA. The Vantec adapter has turned out to be a nice all-in-one solution and I recommend it for quickly connecting hard drives via USB to another PC. I have not yet seen another solution at this price which offers both IDE and SATA connections.