I had an old laptop that I purchased back around 1999. After a couple of years of use, the screen broke from excessive opening and closing, so I stopped using it. I figured I would connect a monitor to it at some point and get anything important off of the hard drive before I tossed it out. There was nothing critical on it, but there was some stuff that I did want to retrieve. No hurry. Fast forward to 2010. I'm finally ready to clean out that old hard drive and the damn laptop won't power up now. I tested the supply and it was good, so something else is now wrong with the laptop. Maybe just a battery, but who knows where to get a battery for that old thing? Didn't really want to buy one either. A little reaearch on the internet and low and behold, there are cases you can use to house an internal hard drive like mine. So I buy this thing. A few days later, it comes in the mail. It took me about 5 minutes to get the hard drive installed into the case and connected to a USB port on my Vista machine. It instantly recognised the old hard drive, which is smaller than some jump drives available today. I copied everything from the old drive to the new drive just like that. This case worked perfectly. Mission accomplished. I would recommend this product to anyone with a similar problem. Just make sure you get the right case for your hard drive type. The ATA case was a bit harder to find than the more current SATA design.2.5" USB 2.0 IDE/PATA Hard Disk Drive HDD Case Enclosure 500GB Max Capacity 2.5" USB 2.0 IDE Hard Drive HDD Case Enclosure - Black
The product quality is substandard. USB connector doesn't line up to allow inserting the connector; the IDE connector is very loose BUT with a little effort and a lot of attention not to break anything (it's so flimsy) it works.
I managed to connect the replaced IDE Dell laptop drive to the laptop and back up all files. If you're looking for a portable rugged external drive, get a Lacie (that's what I use to store data).
It does what it's supposed to do, but it's easy to get out of alignment, and a bit difficult to fit in. Not enough to be a problem, just that it could be a bit better, hence 4 instead of 5 stars.
It's perfect for the cost, though, and a great buy.
I've been using the case for a couple years and it works great. The only problem I've had is that the drive came unplugged inside the case at one point. The drive wasn't recognized when I plugged it into my computer but it was obvious what was wrong when I opened the case. It would be nice to have some way to hold the drive to the end cap to prevent it from being unplugged.
Simple and small, it does what you think it does. Provides a simple enclosure for a 2.5" drive. I had to place a small piece of paper folded up to snug the drive into the enclosure, otherwise you could feel it moving top to bottom slightly. Only works with powered USB ports, haven't had any luck using the ports on my keyboard, etc.
Perfect little drive enclosure, exactly what I wanted.
I gave it 4 stars because [1] It's cheap and [2] it does work.
I didn't give it 5 stars because the one I bought (elsewhere and not here on Amazon) would not recognize the new 320GB hard drive I bought for my HP laptop. I read afterward that it was only good for 300GB or less. So I was unable to use it to create a clone of my old hard drive. I ended up reinstalling Windows on the new drive and then copying files from my old 120GB drive which did work in this enclosure.
There was probably an easier way but not within my expertise. - Hd Enclosure - Drive Enclosures - Hdd Enclosure - Hard Drive'
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