Yeah the Chinese sata adapters are hit and miss quality wise. The main point I wanted to make is that the network function doesn't exist on those.
The little sata kit board you can get can be used on a genuine adapter, this will give you sata and still retain network function.
As I said you can just use a pata to sata adapter with the original network adapter. You won't be able to use a desktop sata HDD that way though, but laptop sata drives use less power anyway.
