Vantec 2.5" / 3.5" / 5.25" SATA / IDE to USB 2.0 Adapter - Model CB-ISATAU2

Pros: These have saved my bacon on MORE than one occasion!!! I have seen a bunch of negative reviews on this product & thought I'd put my 2 cents in to try & help... I have 2 items like these (and BOTH from different manufacturers & BOTH OF THEM work perfectly). The ONLY thing you have to watch out for is IF you are hooking these up to an old "IDE" type drive. The jumpers MUST be set to "SLAVE" (ON the drive itself) BEFORE you hook it up to the power AND the USB port of your PC. I have used these on OVER 30 different PC's (From different manufacturers) & have NEVER had a problem. I have also used these on PC's ranging from Win 95, Win 98SE, Win ME, Vista, Win 7 (32 AND 64 BIT), Linux, & EVEN MAC PC's. The only problem I ran into was that Win 95 AND Win 98SE required a driver for it to work. NONE of the other Operating Systems required ANY drivers as it installed it's own driver for it. PLEASE PEOPLE - READ THE INSTRUCTIONS COMPLETELY BEFORE YOU USE ANY NEW ITEM... Hop

Cons: The ONLY thing you have to watch out for is IF you are hooking these up to an old "IDE" type drive. The jumpers MUST be set to "SLAVE" (ON the drive itself) BEFORE you hook it up to the power AND the USB port of your PC. I have also used these on PC's ranging from Win 95, Win 98SE, Win ME, Vista, Win 7 (32 AND 64 BIT), Linux, & EVEN MAC PC's. The only problem I ran into was that Win 95 AND Win 98SE required a driver for it to work. NONE of the other Operating Systems required ANY drivers as it installed it's own driver for it. PLEASE PEOPLE - READ THE INSTRUCTIONS COMPLETELY BEFORE YOU USE ANY NEW ITEM...

Overall Review: It would be nice if they made these for USB 3.0 but then again, they probably will eventually...

Pros: Easy to use, versatile, and so very convenient! Whenever I need to do a surface scan on a HDD, or need a CD/DVD drive for my tablet for a minute... It's great just being able to grab this and hook it to the drive without having to deal with an enclosure which could involve screws and having to have a few different ones around. (One for IDE, one for Sata)

Cons: Plug - This is no fault of the product as the drive(s) need power to work. It just would be so much greater if you could plug one end to drive and other to PC without having to have a plug available too! Not always an easy task! Might just have to start searching the USB 3.0 ones to see if I can find one bus powered.

Pros: Works well. Does the job.

Cons: none

Overall Review: You cant really go wrong with this. Good price, power suply works well. I have used it many times

Pros: I have bought a few of these for various people including a friend that is Linux user and everyone happy except the Linux user. It plays friendly in windows 7 and 8 I have not tried in Vista or XP only because I no longer have those OS's available. It has the connections needed for current formats but I am sure that soon the industry will make their usual change and force us to buy another type

Cons: not Linux friendly he gets it to work occasionally but not better than 50% of time he uses Mepis

Pros: Inexpensive, all connectors needed for 3.5" and 2.5" IDE and SATA drives. No drivers required. Worked with any drive I tried - about 10 so far, from an old 20GB Quantum ATA66 to 500GB SATAII. I tried two different brands before and they were picky about hard drives.

Cons: Flaky power connector, doesn't maintain contact if even slightly touched, must be bad crimping inside the molex plug. I'll have to fix this myself, not a big enough problem to request RMA.

Overall Review: Except for the bad power plug it'd be 5 stars: very useful gadget to have around.

Pros: very versatile. Instantly converts the following list of storage devices : 1. 3.5 inch Desktop HDD 2. 3.5 inch SATA HDD 3. 5.25 inch CD/DVD drives 4. 2.5 inch laptop HDD that you may have lying around into an external hard drive. No need to buy different size enclosures for each of these spare drives. Save the cash.

Cons: try to minimize usage to data backup and synchronize periodically. constantly tugging around with the interface can break or bend pins on your drive ( not a fault of the equipment however. those pins are made flimsy anyway). Also don't lift drive by holding only to the adapter. This will surely bend pins prematurely. One more important thing. When disconnecting follow the below sequence of steps : 1. Software disconnect ( stop usb device or HDD) 2. Disconnect adapter from USB port of computer 3. Disconnect the AC power supply of HDD.

Pros: this adapter can be a snap to use, i.e pretty much just plug and play, or it can be little tricky depending on your situation. if the hard drive you want to connect is simply a storage drive (filled with docs, images, vids, etc. but no operating system) then you can be up and running pretty quickly, albeit you may have to fiddle with the drive's jumper settings (master, slave) depending on the type of drive you're attaching (i believe the documentation says to set the jumpers to master, but that doesn't always work). however if the drive you're connecting has an operating system loaded, say an older os than your current system, and it is from a different machine (i.e. different hardware configuration) you may have to jump through a few ownership hoops in order to get it up and running as the old os will not recognize the system, resulting in an access denied error. my experience: with jumpers set to master i attached my old drive (lmaxtor, xp loaded along with a ton of other files, removed from a different machine) to my new machine that has windows 8/64 installed. the drive did not show up in explorer, disk management or device manager - what did show up was the yellow question mark in device manager under other devices. i then set the jumpers to slave and tried again - this time the drive showed up in explorer, disk management and device manager. however when i selected the drive in explorer i got an access denied message even though i am the administrator. after a quick google search i found this solution: 1. command prompt: takeown /F "F:" /A /R /D Y where "F:" is your drive letter. 2. and take ownership of the drive via disk management as outlined here: http://www.eightforums.com/tutorials/2808-take-ownership-file-folder-drive-registry-key-windows-8-a.html seems like a lot of messing around but it really is painless and quick once you know what to do - hope some find this helpful.

Cons: none

Pros: In theory, this is a very versatile kit for temporary service-oriented connections of hard drives to a working PC. However, the "new" version of this kit (no change in model or part number) currently shipping from Newegg is not necessarily an improvement (see Cons below). Note that the Newegg product listing's photo images depict the previous version of this product.

Cons: The previous version of this kit was far better for 2.5" notebook drives. The new version omits the 2-wire power supply connection on the Vantec device (and corresponding Molex to 2-pin power supply adapter cable) for use with 2.5" notebook drives. As a result, all power for a 2.5" drive must come through the USB connection and this arrangement is not always sufficient. While working with 100 MB Hitachi 7200 RPM 2.5" PATA drives (also purchaed from Newegg), I got USB power surge warnings from Windows XP and it would not recognize the new drive, even in Disk Manager. The solution was to borrow a friend's previous version of the Vantec rig which worked like a champ.

Overall Review: Don't buy this kit if you plan to work primarily with 2.5" drives, especially 7200 RPM. I've had similar power supply issues with external 2.5" drive enclosures that depend on USB power. The previous version of the Vantec rig is the only arrangement I've found that seems to work consistently. I wish I had one of my own.