Universal Drive Adapter
By Dan Robinson
Company: NewerTechnology
Price: $27.99 (US)
http://www.amazon.com/Universal-Drive-Adapter

There's not a lot to say about a product that "just works."

That's the case with the NewerTech Universal Drive Adaptor . . . it just works.
If you need to plug in a bare drive, This is what you need. The UDA Adapter accepts SATA 2.5 & 3.5, and IDE/ATA 2.5 and 3.5-inch hard drives and 5.25 ATAPI drives as well.

Connect the drive in the order listed on the instructions and you have a new icon on your desktop. The only item of caution is to make sure that on 3.5 IDE drives, you have the jumpers set to "Master" or "Single Drive." Since each drive is different and many drives don't have the settings printed on the drive itself, you'll need to check on line with the manufacturers' websites to get the jumper positions.

The instructions are sparse, but complete. I've included the accompanying pics here:

In the third picture, You'll notice they've included a short ribbon cable. I tried without it on an old IDE drive, plugging the adapter directly to the drive, but it didn't work. Once I did it the way they told me to, it popped right up. There's a moral here somewhere.

The Bottom Line:

Well worth the money. If you need to access bare hard drives occasionally, as I do with clients, the NewerTech UDA is the way to go. This one goes in my trunk to be handy when I have to rescue someone's data from an old hard drive. MUCH better than carrying around three different drive enclosures.

CMW Rating: