Cables Unlimited USB-2110 USB 2.0 to IDE and SATA Adapter Cable with Power

Background:I had about 23 hard drives sitting in my basement from various computers long gone (I never got around to deleting all the data on them).I was able to mount 20 of them on both Linux and OSX using this tool (the 3 that I could not mount were DOA - I don’t blame this tool, the DOA issue is probably why they were in my hard drive graveyard in the first place).Drives ranged in size from 1GB to 3TB. I had a good mix of 2.5 vs 3.5 drives and a good mix of IDE vs SATA.I mounted the drives first on my OSX box to pull anything like pictures etc off that I may have not backed up somewhere else and then moved the drive over to a Linux box where I ran shred against the device.Lessons learned:Unplug the USB before swapping the drive - I had issues when I forgot to do that.What it comes with.USB to 3.5IDE/2.5IDE/SATA adapter.power brick with 3.5 IDE type power plug3.5 IDE power to SATA power adapter3.5 IDE power to 2 din power adapterSATA cableThings I liked:It just works with a minimum of fuss on a large number of drives.Why I dinged it a star:Had I not installed drives in the past this little tool would have been very intimidating and required some googling to figure out what I was doing. The various power plugs and adapters are just screaming to get lost when you store this and the power adapters look like rigged up prototypes.

So far this works okay, but the unbranded third party knockoff I got this time is of nowhere near the quality of the last one I bought several years ago, with its much thinner black usb cable instead of the heavy clear one, and the general overall cheapness and lack of attention put into assembling the rest of it. (fuzzy dot-matrix screen printing, left over flashing, etc...)Averages around 40Mb/s transfer rate to a SATA 3.0 drive. Not the best, but not horrible either with USB 2.0.One positive is that the 40 pin ide plug is closer to the edge of the thing than on my old one, and this one's molded on molex plug on the power supply doesn't need a tab trimmed off the side so everything can wedge in at an angle like my old one does for things that have the power and IDE plug side by side.Overall it works fairly well, it's just noticeably lower quality than the pictured item I thought I was going to get.

I guess I'll have to find another USB 2.0 to IDE and Sata since this product failed on me. I like to wait a few weeks or month[s] before writing a review for products and now my time has come to write this review. I've used this product for nearly 2 months and when I attempted to use it earlier it made a "popping" noise. The green light doesn't light up and now it's pretty much useless, well not entirely useless. I can still attach HDD's to my PC if I can find away to power the HDD's. I'm not sure why it made a popping noise. I plugged it into the surge protector as usual with no HDD attached [thank goodness >_>] and the power brick gave up on me. While it worked it performed pretty good. It does connect SATA and IDE HDD's with no problems via USB. Has minor flaws and is pretty well designed and simple. Unfornately my $20+ dollars has gone to waste. This is a cheap product so I wasn't surprised.In order to get this device to perform correctly I suggest plugging it in the wall and then attaching your HDD. After that attach the IDE or the SATA connectors and connect the USB to the computer. Any other way your PC might randomly shut down on you. Hope I was able to help some of you with the precedure.So if you are trying to decide if you should buy this product or not I will tell you like this from my personal experience. If you want to use it for short-term use go ahead and take a risk by buying this product. If you are looking for long-term use I suggest spending a little more for another product.Pros:-It connects IDE or SATA HDDs via USB to PC's when following the correct procedures.Cons:-It stopped working on me after about 2 months of use-NO instruction manual came with my product.

First of all, i'm an I/T geek and i've used several of these adapters. This one works well but has a couple flaws:CON's:1) It comes with no instructions or spec's, which are necessary because of #2 ...2) This device will not work if you connect it to a laptop running on battery power. I connected this device to my laptop's USB port. All three SATA drives were recognized but failed to be accessed until my I/T "spider-sense" tingled & I connected my laptop's A/C adapter. Now all of the drives are accessible.Most users are not professional I/T geeks and would not be aware of this- they'd erroneously think the adapter was defective and likely return it.PRO's:So, as long as you connect this device to a desktop or laptop on A/C power, it'll work fine. One thing i particularly liked is the SATA power adapter cable is short, sturdy, and is shaped at a right angle to "idiot proof" it from naive users who would otherwise yank it straight out by the (fragile) wires and not by the end piece.I give it 4 stars.

I recently broke down and decided to rip all my cd's to the computer. The computer in question is set high on a shelf in the living room and so getting up on a stool 300+ times didnt seem like a happy option nor did dragging the comp off the shelf so I got this item. Went down stairs to the computer graveyard closet and scrounged a dvd rw and came back up pluged it in and windows found it right away and off I went with the help of a few usb extensions. Out of the 300+ cd's I ripped it only had issues a few times where it somehow dissapeared from the drives and I had to restart the computer for it to find it again. Other than that it worked great. After it served its purpose with the dvd drive I went back down to the graveyard and tore appart one of the old laptops I had down there and ripped out the harddrive, plugged it into this device on the computer I have in the office and saw what was on that harddrive, then reformatted it and now use it as a back up drive and it works great. This is a neat little toy I may get another one just to have it, never no when you may need a spare.