The picture and technical description don't make clear what is included. In addition to the USB to IDE/SATA adapter shown, it includes a 5-inch 7-pin M/M serial ATA Cable, a power supply for both SATA power and 4-pin Molex power, and a single page of concise, clear instructions. It was everything that I needed to connect an IDE disk from a defunct computer to the USB port of my laptop. Amazingly Vista could read the IDE disk with no additional software. Cables To Go 30504 USB 2.0 to IDE or Serial ATA Drive Adapter (Black)
After a bad experience with a similar product sold by eforcity, I was a bit nervous about buying another IDE to USB converter. The CablesToGo product was a welcome change. Everything worked smoothly and I was able to read the drive immediately. The power cable is well made and even includes a convenient switch on the DC lines to the drive.
I would buy this product again.
This is a great product and includes everything you need to hookup a Serial ATA (SATA) or IDE hard drive. In my case my SATA hard drive failed on my Vista machine, so after installing a new hard drive, I needed to recover my data. I had no problem at all and I didn't even need any software. Recommended!
I just received this product from Amazon. It arrived three days before Amazon promised it with their free shipping. Always a good deal!
I have been a software developer for over 20 years and I have collected a number of old IDE drives. They, needless to say, are of no use in today's laptops and are easily out-classed by today's giant disk drives. However, you can't just toss old drives like these into the trash, because they may still contain your private and business data files. I initially got this cable to be able to wipe and reformat these drives before throwing them away.
However, after I ordered the cable, I realized that I have hundreds of CDs and DVDs that contain years of back-up data. These discs take up a lot of storage space in my closet. I don't want to get rid of the content of these discs, but I would like to reclaim the closet space they require. The idea then became to use this cable to copy content from back-up CDs and DVDs to these old IDE hard drives and store those in the closet, taking up a fraction of the space, while still preserving the data.
Many of these old IDE drives I have contain old partitions and old versions of Windows (all the way back to Windows NT 4). None of the computers in our house can use these drives anymore, which is why I never was able to re-use them. This cable makes that all possible again. I wanted to recover any files from them that I might need, and then I wanted to format them. I started off with a 1998 IDE drive that has 6GB of space. I was unable to get the cable to co-operate with the drive. The cable's USB driver installed immediately on my Windows 7 Home Premium laptop, but the disk just couldn't be accessed. I then tried another IDE drive from that year that has 10GB of space. Same there. I was able to get it to show a drive letter in Windows Explorer, briefly, but after that it became inaccessible again.
Finally, I tried a drive that was rated for 40GB of space, a newer drive, one that I used on my old desktop as recently as 2 years ago. The USB driver for the cable installed immediately, and it immediately showed a drive letter for the drive in Windows Explorer. I could read all the files on the drive. I then reformatted it using the cable, and it all worked great.
I then tried two 80GB IDE drives, and was able to immediately access each of them, copy some files from them, and finally delete all the partitions and reformat them.
So, from this I concluded that the problem with the first two drives has nothing to do with the cable itself, but rather that the drives are either too old, have become corrupted, or are simply not supported. All of my IDE drives were manufactured by Western Digital (my personal favorite).
The only issue I have found is that the cable's through-put (bandwidth) is restricted to USB speeds, so you won't quite get the performance you might have been used to when the drive was installed in a computer internally. This is especially true if you use a USB 1.1 socket. I think the cables' solution is great for back-ups, but probably not for continuous day-to-day use, but that's just my opinion.
One added bonus? I got rid of my old desktop but kept the nice DVD burner drive. For the fun of it, I hooked up the DVD burner to the CablesToGo USB to IDE cable and it worked just perfectly. I can now have two DVD drives on my laptop, should the need ever arise (e.g. copying a CD or DVD to another CD or DVD without having to first copy it to the PC).
I highly recommend this cable if you have some old IDE drives laying around. I don't have a SATA drive handy, so I have not tested that interface.'
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