All I can say is: “Where have you been all my life???”.
I was browsing a catalog (I get tons and tons of them) the other day and came across something that looked pretty interesting – a USB Universal Adapter.
As you read this, you might be saying, um, yeah right, interesting – but IT REALLY IS!
I was doing some cleanup down the cellar and came across 15 old hard drives. Ranging from 300MB to 40GB and the thought of ripping open my old Windows XP machine, shutting it down, putting in the drive, turning on the machine, checking the contents of the drive and then REPEATING THAT 15 times was a pretty daunting task.
Let’s take a looksee at this nifty little product, shall we?
I had mostly IDE/ATA drives – which, come to think of it, I have a laptop hard drive floating around here someplace – I can use that as well!
So, you plug the IDE cable into the back of the hard drive, then plug the cable into the USB adapter. Next plug the power plug into the hard drive – the hard drive will spin up – and you’ll know pretty quickly if the hard drive is good or not immediately. I had three drives that had the ‘ol click of death so I didn’t even need to plug in the USB cable! Finally, plug the USB cable into the computer and voila! you have access to that hard drive!!
SO MUCH easier than either plugging the drive directly into a computer case and 1000% easier than cracking open an external hard drive enclosure and swapping out the hard drive, etc.
Now, I can confidentally throw away the three “bad” drives and I can dump the sub 1GB sized drives as I can get a thumb drive with more capacity! That leaves me with just a couple of 40GB, 20GB and a 6GB drive which I’m going to keep for backups to my backups and hopefully, I’ll never need them.
Check out this picture that I found on one of the hard drives:
Finding that picture was worth every penny of the $29 I spent on the adapter!!!
Finally, I did one last test – I put a IDE DVD drive on the adapter and fired it up – IT WORKED!!! So now I’ll be using the USB adapter as an external DVD drive for my old Powerbook G4 (the Super Drive went kaput about 8 months ago).
If you have a bunch of hard drives hanging around and you need to access the data just once in a while, you’ll LOVE this little device!
Speaking of little devices, would you happen to know if there exists a power supply to run your laptop (mac) off of your cig ligher in the car? Boy would THAT have been great during our 11 hour drive this past weekend.
Actually, I think any DC power converter would work, just make sure it’ll draw enough power to work the laptop… this one looks like it would work Duracell DMPI-175 Duracell 175-Watt Pocket Inverter.
That one seems like it has plenty of power for a laptop and powers USB devices as well!
I actually have two portable power devices, for my phone… I’ll blog about them today perhaps!