Bipra USB 2.0 to SATA/IDE Adapter Kit with Power Adapter for 2.5/3.5/5.25 Inch SATA or IDE Drive

In days gone by, if you wanted to access a hard drive that is not installed in a system, you have to install it as a slave drive, or fit it into an external drive enclosure. And if you had a mix of 3.5" ATA, 2.5" laptop, and SATA drives, you could have to buy a couple of enclosures... then along comes this device from Nexons, and all of these drive types become instantly accessible. Just plug in the power cable provided, and connect the HD to USB lead, and in the few seconds that it takes your PC to recognise the device, you have an extra hard drive showing under "My Computer". Working in IT, I could have done with one of these a dozen times over in the last year alone. It makes any hard drive into a highly portable device, and is the ultimate solution for accessing files on the hard drive from that old PC.

I thought any seeking to purchase this would like to know, it works with my SATA2 1.5TB HDD.

I also thought Linux geeks would like to know it works fine with my CentOS 5 install.

The only issue I have had with this;

It drops off the system after several hours, I think this is a limitation with USB on my various desktops and laptops though, also USB conflicts, like one machine lost it's third internal HDD when this was connected, another machine lost the USB keyboard when I plugged this in, but again, I do not blame this device for them problems.

Once you got it hooked up, it's a USB HDD, like any, you should have a Windows supported format to have it *appear* in My Computer, otherwise use Management console or your fav tool to partition and format the drive. All USB limitations apply.

It's cheap and I am careful but future purchasers may wish to know, when assembled [cables plugged into the main 'body' of the device] the SATA connection is delicate, if you use it and cannot find the drive, check this link. I am not saying it's a fault, I had it hanging in air from cables and it was likely moved also when I realised the SATA connector had unseated, but it is the weakest link in the chain of cabling from the drive to machine.

These are more tips then complaints, I give 5 stars, after weeks of transferring data from loads of machines to all types and sizes of disks. I mean for £17 delivered I managed to turn an existing drive into a USB 1.5TB HDD!

Since I pointed out the weaker points, here's some praise the power cabling is tough and substantial. A power brick that takes normal kettle lead [included] and has two heads from it, one for molex one for SATA power, they each have independent power switches, and since this kit is not reliant on the other bits [used for the data] you could power anything using normal molex or SATA power.

I have some SATA hotswap style caddies for removable HDD's, these are made for swapping drives about and use connectors within itself that are much better for constant swapping, the USB-SATA adapter here plugs into one caddy dock and then I got drives in caddies I use with this housing assembly to swap about drives with minimal physical risk to the drives and adaptors SATA connectors, which are weak, again this is not a fault of this device I am reviewing, the SATA standard connectors are all weak by design [I have broken them in the past].

Conclusion, up to 1.5TB at least on Windows or Linux, take care of it and it will do the job.

Wow - this item helped me to recover data from my PC which spectacularly failed in a puff of smoke the other day. My power supply caused damage to the motherboard, so the PC would not switch on. I only had some of the data backed up (I know it is bad practice but I won't be so complacent again). Searching for info on the PC problem revealed a well known issue with the power supply, and that there would most likely be very large bill to repair the 6 year old machine, so I took the plunge and replaced the PC with a much more capable and flexible Dell laptop to allow me to take full advantage of my wireless broadband.
But - as I had only backed up restore files and some important personal documents to the BT vault, how was I going to recover what I had failed to back up, especially my photo albums? A work colleague suggested that provided the hard drive had not been damaged, it was worth attempting recovery using this universal hard drive adapter.
Nexon delivered within 2 days which is pretty impressive. I unplugged the PC tower and removed the side panel. Identified the hard drive and removed the data plug (with ribbon cable) and the 4 pin power supply. Depending upon the type of drive, you push the large plug into the multi pin socket, and the power supply plug into the drive's power supply socket. The other end of the data socket is attached to a USB cable which I plugged into my laptop's USB socket. Plug in the power cable and switch on the power supply using the switch on the cable. This powers up the PC hard drive. On windows vista the PC drive showed up as another external drive under My Computer. I was then able to drag and drop the files onto my new laptop (once I had got my head around the file structure that I was looking at - as I first had to find my profile in Documents and Settings).
I guess I was fortunate in that the hard drive was undamaged, but this piece of kit was very easy indeed for a non computer hardware expert to use. The whole recovery process took around 15 minutes. I will remember in future to always back up regularly to an external drive or online vault, but thanks NEXON for the hardware to recover my data.