Customer Reviews

Sabrent USB-2535 USB 2.0 to IDE Cable for 2.5-/3.5-/ 5.25-Inch Drive with Power Adapter

5 star:		(21)
4 star:		(9)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(9)

 

 

Once I gave up trying to follow the broken English bogus instructions, this worked great!! I was able to recover data from two hard drives and burn cds. One drive I left installed in the desktop PC case while I ran a virus scan on it from the 'good' laptop.

MY instructions are:
put hard drive jumper to master
power up the harddrive by plugging in the power supply.
Once it is spinning, plug in the IDE connector end, then the USB end.

That goes against all my geeking instincts but it was the only way my laptop would recognize the hard drive. The hard drives wouldn't even spin up if I connected the IDE connector first and power second.

fyi - disk space isn't reported properly on the hard drive

WOW! I'm totally impressed. I bought this device after reading mostly positive reviews thinking that it would work but I might have to tweak with it a bit. WRONG! I just plugged it in and heard the familiar 'bong' of Windows XP finding a new device. Managed to drag several gigabytes of data from an old hard drive to my new PC then connected another hard drive
<OL>
<LI>power off device, not PC
<LI>disconnected USB cable
<LI>disconnected drive
<LI>connected new drive
<LI>powered up and plugged in
</OL>
and got the 'bong' again. I haven't even taken the CD that comes with it out of the envelope.

Speed: Excellent!
Functionality: Excellent! Features a push button power switch near the plug for the drive.
Value: Excellent!

This product is really intended for someone that does a lot of work on hard drives. Data recovery, wipe and destroy...that sort of thing. It isn't really suited to someone that wants to use it as a regular connection to an extra hard drive...though it certainly can do this. If you want an extra drive, you can purchase very inexpensive USB drives almost anywhere.

For me, it worked right out of the box on an old WD 1.6 gig drive and a Quantum 1.6 gig.

Some Caveats:

Find a mouse pad or some such to set the drive on. DON'T JUST SET IT ON TOP OF YOUR CHASSIS OR METAL OF ANY KIND. You are dealing with an unmounted IDE drive. If some of the connections or jumpers on the bottom touch--or even just come close to-- metal you could screw things up quite nicely.

The "manual" that comes with it is a single sheet of paper about 3 by 3 with the typical butchered English that we have all come to expect from our fine overseas suppliers. One of the only intelligible pieces of info on this form is "set your drive to Master". If you do not know what this means, get some help with it. Most drives have a sticker on them showing the jumper configurations, some do not. Others may have the jumpers labeled with tiny letters like MA, SL, CS, etc. For me, I found that the WD had to be set on Master and the Quantum on Single.

NOTE: If the drive is not formatted or the partition is corrupted, Win2K and WinXP might connect it but be unable to assign a drive letter. Simply go to your Disk Manager and create partition/format/assign the drive.

I have about 100 drives I have to wipe before handing them over to an artist...this product is going to make it relatively painless.

This is an OK product when you get the hang of it, it works like it says but it really needs an on/off switch for the power supply other wise you could jerk your drive the wrong way and cause a hard crash (heads smash into disk platters) in my opinion you should not have to handle the disk after it has power!

Remember if you get this hook the connector to the drive then connect the power or your PC just won't see the drive!

I have also had system instability leavening a drive connected to long a few times and have to force disk services to shut down in WinXP PRO sp2 or restart so use it for data recovery or burning a disk then disconnect!!!

TO REMOVE: First unplug the drive from the USB port! if your kill the power to the drive your computer will not know it was removed and will become unstable trying to read it!

also your drive MUST have the jumper set to MASTER!

Works perfectly. It's really convenient if you swap hard drives all the time. Works every time, and I've had no troubles with it at all. I use it to burn DVDs too, works like a charm with that too.

I used it with a Seagate Barracuda 7200.7, 120Gb, configured as master.
It recognized the HD correctly, assigned a letter, but as soon as I would transfer data to it disconnects.
I tried with an usb HUB, and behing the computer directly, no difference, same problem.
I ended up buying the Vantec IDE to USB adapter, it works perfectly on the same configuration.

The Sabrent USB2.0 to IDE Cable and power supply work wonderfully.
I am able to use an old drive from my smoked desktop as a plug-in USB drive
to my laptop and recovered all my data. Also, now I can use another old drive
I had to backup music and photos. It is well worth the money, I think.

What more can you ask for. Arrived as promised, performed as advertised. A definite must for any IT guy to get data from any old drive

This cable worked great right out of the box, giving one the ability to connect a loose hard drive to your computer via the USB 2.0 port. All functionality is there, drag and drop, etc. Great way to recover data if something goes wrong with the boot process, or a missing operating system error. Just be careful when you place the cable onto the connector pins of the hard drive. Since the cable is both a 3.5" and 2.5", it just requires some care to get it on correctly.

It worked right out of the box. I had a burned out emachine computer with atleast 450 family pics on it sitting around for 4 years. I took the hard drive out connected it with the USB into my new laptop and there were all the pics (my wife was very pleased also). I also used it to connect an old Hp lap top that wouldn't go on. I used my current McAfee Virus scan on the drive and now the lap top works. It found 3-4 different trojan viruses cleaned them up and now the lap top works fine (I don't know if that was the problem but it works now). I used the recovery discs and now it's back to factory settings. Haven't used it for anything else yet.