I couldn't get this device to work under Mac OS X or WindowsXP, gave up and called for a return authorization...but the support person told me this: For IDE drives, the drive's jumpers MUST be set to "MASTER" (not cable select), UNLESS the brand is Western Digital, in which case the jumpers must be set to "SINGLE" (i.e. remove all jumpers). Sure enough, it worked after that! Hope this helps someone else. Sabrent USB-DSC5 Serial ATA or IDE 2.5-/3.5-Inch to USB 2.0 Cable Converter Adapter with Power Supply
I'm nonplussed at reviews mentioning how it's being used as a full-time connector for a SATA or IDE drive. It's clearly not aimed at that market at all. This is a kit designed for rescue/ recovery operations of someone else's HDD. Case in point: me.
I wrecked the partition table of my primary work HDD. All in-situ attempts failed, so I brought the laptop home, mounted the HDD to my SATA cable kit, and ran the excellent TestDisk tool from Christophe Grenier. My partition table recovered, I wrote it to disk and bright the HDD back into the laptop. I'm back up and writing this from the work laptop now (don't say anything).
I would never look at this complex jumble of wires and adapters and think "well, I'll just hook it up and let it go for a few years". No, sorry, incorrect application, despite the instruction manual showing you how to do it. This is a stripped-down kit designed to travel with your rescue ops laptop when making a house call, like to Grandma's PC. I find it's easier to run virus scanning, defrag, etc when the HDD is controlled by my known-good laptop.
I withheld a fifth star because it's a complex mess of wires. I don't know how one could make it look elegant and preserve its functionality, but whoever can do it merits the fifth star. Wholly recommended product for rescue operations.
-Fred
This is not meant to be a long-term, set it on your desk, solution. Its a quick cable to transfer data off a hard drive or between hard drives for an upgrade. I've used this with SATA, IDE and laptop IDE. All worked great. I was able to plug the USB device into either my Windows or Mac computers. Very happy with this product!
Its great for cases where a laptop gets destroyed, yet the hard drive is fine. I know someone who spilled water on their laptop, and pretty much fried it. But the hard drive was fine. Using this device I copied the hard drive files to her new computers.
I've owned devices in the past that can do this, but the 3-in one interface setup is awesome.
Kudos to the other reviewer who pointed out the difference between Western Digital Drives and others. The instructions make NO mention of this at all.
Here is the step by step procedure that I followed and it worked perfectly on a Win XP machine:
1. Attach the power supply to an outlet and plug into the hard drive's 4-pin power receptacle.
2. Attach the IDE adapter to the hard drive.
3. Plug the USB into the computer.
If you plug the USB in first, then the IDE to the drive, you have to take the USB out and plug it back in for it to recognize the drive.
Drive select should be Master for drives other than Western Digital.
No jumper at all for Western Digital devices.
4 stars for the stupid instructions and complete lack of website mention of this as well. Other than that it works fine.
I tried using this adapter with two SATA hard drives and experienced errors on Windows XP SP2 (fully patched).
The first time I was copying about 120GB of data to a 160GB Samsung hard drive. About 20GB into the transfer Windows gave me a bunch of "delayed write" errors and said the written data may be corrupt.
The second time I was using Western Digital's diagnostic utility to zero-out a WD 500GB hard drive. This failed about 10% into the operation with strange write errors that I attribute to this adapater.
Fortunately I had another adapter, the "Sabrent Serial ATA (SATA) to USB 2.0 Cable Converter," which is a very similar adapter except that it only supports SATA and not IDE. I repeated both operations with the SATA-only adapater and everything worked. I had no trouble coping all my data to the 160GB Samsung drive and I successfully zeroed my 500GB Western Digital drive. Since the only difference in configuration between the failed attempts and the successful ones was the adapter I used, I can only conclude that this particular adapter caused the failures the first time.
So while I can't endorse this particular adapter, if all you need is SATA support, then I highly recommend the similar Sabrent Serial ATA (SATA) to USB 2.0 Cable Converter.
what makes this better than other ones i've seen in its class is that it has lights. the adapter will tell you when the hard drive is connected via USB successfully. it also tells you if there is hard disk activity on the IDE or SATA hard drive. I don't use the 1.8-inch hard drive feature, but I'm glad its there if I ever need it. I might need to rescue my iPod hard drive one day! It works great on my old iMac running Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger). - Ide Adapter - Usb Hard Drive Adapter - Usb To Sata - Usb'
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