NewerTech USB 2.0 Universal Drive Adapter Review
So, if you can't tell from the pictures, this is one of those nifty gadgets that allows you to connect your old hard drives, optical drives, or anything else that uses an IDE, Laptop IDE, or SATA interface. It's great for when your laptop or desktop goes kaput and you need the data off of the drive but don't have time to rebuild or repair the other components.
I actually had 3 drives that were exactly like that, they had come from laptops I had managed to destroy and I needed the photos and music off of at least 1 of them, and needed to check the other two then format them. This Drive Adapter is so easy to use especially with notebook hard drives.
The reason is because when you are working with Laptop hard drives, you don't have to bust out the huge power brick and plug it in, the drive adapter is able to bus-power the drive, which means if you had a makeshift enclosure and one of these you could easily carry around several external hard drives and use them just like any commercial model costing hundreds of dollars. Also, it just so happens I'd just finished repairing one of the laptops that one of the hard drives belonged to, but it was a tablet, and didn't have an optical drive so installation of a new OS was going to be tricky, but not with this, I hooked up a spare desktop optical drive that I had lying around and set the notebook to boot from USB and it worked great.
This isn't the first one of these that I have ever had, but it was definitely the most convenient. My previous one required the power brick for everything, even the laptop hard drives, everything had to be plugged in, in a weird order in order for it to work at all and even then, it was really finicky. This one was a breeze to use, I plugged in the hard drive, and then plugged it into the computer and it connected and started reading the drive. File transfers and the subsequent formatting weren't slow at all, in fact that were considerably fast compared to a Lacie external hard drive I have.
The lights on the adapter are a great indicator for when everything is connected properly and working well, but they also tell you when they aren't. Sadly one of the 3 laptop hard drives I had to check out actually was damaged, and the lights let me know it so I didn't waste hours trying to figure out where the problem was. Like I said, it was extremely easy to use, almost completely self explanatory and it worked. As I mentioned before, this would be great if you could find some sort of anti-static drive enclosure for your laptop drives because then you could just carry them around with this adapter and use it as a regular external hard drive. Well, the people who sent me this were kind enough to send along another one of their products which is a rubber (anti-static) skin for a 2.5" laptop hard drive, it was perfect, the small "feet" kept it off the surface and the rubber should do a sufficient job of keeping static electricity from frying the drive.
Overall, I give it 3.0 out of 5 gears, only because it's really not that impressive of a gadget, useful sure, and it was a breeze to use, it's just not that impressive.
[rating: 3.0/5]