If you’ve ever find yourself in a position where a hard drive in a laptop or desktop PC has failed or has become unreadable, you’ll know what I mean when I say that trying to get them working when they’re set as the ‘boot’ disk can be incredibly frustrating; most of the time nothing will happen and you just get a variety of error messages, so you’re forced to look into alternative methods of getting access to the disk and the (potentially important) files that are stored on it. I experienced (or to be more succinct, my partner experienced) such an event recently when a laptop hard drive became corrupted and her laptop failed to boot. Running various diagnostic tools didn’t to cut the mustard and for all intents and purposes it seemed as though any chance of recovering the data on the disk was lost - so it wasn’t until, while browsing forums for suggestions on what to try next, someone suggested getting a USB to SATA connector as it was possible that I might be able to access the drive and retrieve the files, photos and stuff that she had on it. As you may have guessed already, I decided to order one of these Inateck ones in the hope that it would do the trick. The adapter arrived the next day, as is usual for Amazon Prime, and came in a totally frill-free package with no instructions to speak of, so by buying one of these, Inateck are assuming that you are at least somewhat adept in the art of IT-related shenanigans. I duly removed the adapter from the packaging, removed the 2.5” hard disk from my partner’s laptop, pushed the adapter’s SATA connector into the disk and plugged it into one of my laptop’s USB 3.0 ports. The disk was detected properly as a storage device but, as suspected, Windows was having problems reading it. I decided to run a ‘checkdsk /r’ command on the disk (something that even Windows 10’s built-in repair tools wasn’t allowing, weirdly) and I was amazed when it managed to successfully repair the bad sectors and iffy boot sector of the disk. A quick (proper) ejection of the USB connector and popping it back in caused the disk to appear normally in Windows Explorer and I was able to read the files on it. This was totally unexpected, so I now consider this little gadget to be an essential standby tool just in case anything goes wrong in future - it really saved my backside! It’s dead simple to use, connects easily and (provided the disk connected to it isn’t completely cream-crackered) should allow diagnostics and repairs to be done to it. Since it’s got a standard SATA connector on it, it should be good for all SATA storage devices, which means that it is good for nearly all 2.5” and 3.5” drives and will work for SSD as well as traditional mechanical hard disks. All in all, this has been a fantastic purchase, so five stars for Amazon and five stars for Inateck!