In a moment of weakness, I decided I should also pick up two of these adapters and give them a try. They arrived yesterday, and have non-descript 1084 regulators. The PCBs look basically like the pictures on the seller's item page.
Hooked them up and they seem to do the trick. I'm using a bit of thermal padding on the top side of the drive facing the plastic cover. I doubt it will do much, but I also didn't want the pads on the label side, which is facing the PCB. If anything the added pressure may produce some better contact between the PCB and the metal cover of the 1.8" drive, for slightly better heat transfer on that side.
The drives are mounted in an IcyDock ExpressCage (MB324SP-B) which has room for four 2.5" drives up to 12mm, and a tiny 40mm fan at the back. Took a few attempts and some deep breaths to get the drives to slide in fully and lock in place. The PCB of the adapter may be a hair too tall, putting it ever so slightly too high up for the mounting brackets to line up ideally with the SATA and power connector at the back. It wasn't as smooth as I would have hoped for one of the two, but now they can slide in and out fairly well.
Tried a few reboots and power off/on cycles, and they seem stable in my RAID1 array (LSI9212-4i4e SAS2008, IR mode).
Unfortunately I cannot monitor the SMART details through the controller while in IR mode. At least not in ESXi, as far as I know.