after removing the speaker, so that i could look inside the closed computer, i found that you can even leave the power connector as is.
it is very close, but safely doable! no extra nonsense required!
i estimated this differently before and thought it must be like 10 mm less than it actually is.
however, this install is not compatible with cutting off the grating of the main fan.
using a dual adapter on an IDE PCI card was the last round of my testing series... involving 6 different adapter types and all possible connection methods in a QS.
these funny chinese adapters from spain have no manual at all, but the boards look really clean* and well organised and they have the right control LEDs in the right places.
on the packaging it says: "
when connect with device, please make sure to verify the master and slavery"
whatever that means - because there is no master and slave for SATA - and the adapter itself should, to my understanding, automatically appear to its IDE host as two devices, 0 and 1.
but it also means that we have a new code name for them: the "slavery adapter".
*) unlike the horizontal "cheap" adapter boards which usually consist of more glue than PCB.