Customer Reviews

Vantec CB-ISATAU2 SATA/IDE to USB 2.0 Adapter Supports 2.5-Inch, 3.5-Inch, 5.25-Inch Hard Disk Drives (Black)

5 star:		(167)
4 star:		(45)
3 star:		(6)
2 star:		(8)
1 star:		(24)

 

 

This is a very useful device for anyone with a bit of experience tinkering under the hood of a computer. The package includes:

- the actual adapter itself, which provides an USB connection to 3 different types of hard drive connectors -- 5.25" / 3.5" IDE, 2.5" IDE, and SATA.
- an IDE (4-pin MOLEX) power adapter.
- one SATA-to-SATA data cable.
- one IDE (4-pin MOLEX) power to SATA power adapter.
- a mini-CD containing a manual and drivers. It is not necessary to install drivers in Windows ME / 2000/ XP and above systems.

Both the SATA/IDE-to-USB and power adapter cables are reasonably lengthy; 3' for the former, maybe 5.5' for the latter.

Vantec's SATA/IDE to USB 2.0 Adapter provides an easy way to access a hard drive without needing to install it into a computer. It also works great for extracting data from old computers without having to figure out how to turn them on -- all you have to do is take out the hard drive.

I bought two devices of this kind, one is this Vantec USB 2.0 to SATA/IDE adapter and the other one is Bytecc, which is a little less cumbersome to use.

A device like this is a must-have for techies and pros who work with multiple hard disk drives and frequently need to quickly connect an external drive to a PC, regardless whether it's 2.5 or 3.5", SATA or IDE.

When I was buying the first one, I chose the box which weighted less, and apparently that was not a relevant reason, but coincidentaly I made a good choice.

Disadvantages of this device compared to Bytecc's one:
- More parts to carry with, more complex connection
- Needs a manual, which is, although mostly decent technical writing, printed in four pages per one printout without any collating or order
- The power connector (provides the same connection as the standard IDE drive type of power connector usually found inside of PCs) is connected to the power supply with a very do-it-yourself style cable which works but it's rugged with cables sticking out of it and it doesn't have the finish or an appeal of a good quality product.
- It needs several different power cables/adapters and it's easy to lose some

Advantages:
- Unlike the power connectors, the data part/connector looks a bit more sturdy/compact compared to Bytecc
- The SATA drive data connection is done via a regular SATA data cable, so it would work with any SATA drives with non-standard distance between the power and data connector (I haven't seen any like that yet and I've worked with both 2.5" and 3.5" SATA drives).

The USB and AC power supply cables on both devices are too short and could be at least 3' longer.

You may want to read my review of bytecc adapter like this which gives more details how this concept works.

Bottomline: Good product, mostly for techies, my experience with Bytecc one is better

I recently had a WinXP machine die, and needed to transfer the hard drives to my new Vista computer. I also had a couple of hard drives left over from a Win98 machine from another computer that died 5 years ago. I was able to transfer all four drives with no problems whatsoever. I'd seen in another review, that someone was having problems with large files. I had a couple files as big as 20GB, and had no problems. Best $28 I've spent in a while (the place where I bought my computer wanted to charge $85 per drive to do the transfer).

My old laptop crashed not too long ago, but I knew that the files insides the hard drive were intact. To recover the files from a professional (like Geek Squad) would've cost me a couple hundred dollars. So I decided to try this product before I resorted to that. To put it simply, it worked exactly as it should've. I just plugged up my old 2.5" hard drive into it, then connected the USB plug into my desktop and transferred my files. There was no need to take apart my computer like with other hard drive adapters, nor was there any annoying drivers to install. Just plug and play. This product was awesome and saved me not just money, but more importantly, irreplaceable documents, videos and pictures.

I needed to make a backup from a laptop ibm hard drive, an IDE desktop hardrive and a sata desktop hard drive.
All three worked as it should.

word of caution: when conecting the desktop drives to the reader, first conect the drive (sata or ide) to reader and to the provided power supply, after the drive is powered on, then you can conect to the USB port, that way you will not have problems to recognize the drive.

Love this tool! I have used it with my MacBook Pro, my G5 iMac, my wife's Gateway laptop and a Dell desktop.

You can attach any device, CD-ROM, SATA or IDE Hard Drive and they just show up on the desktop with no drivers required.

Should be in any serious geeks toolkit.

I bought this thing because I had an old XP machine with a 80GB hard drive that I've had since mid-2004. The motherboard died on it so I had to get a new machine with Windows 7. I wanted to get everything off my old hard drive and put on the new one. Got the product, plugged it into the old hard drive and the new machine and within half an hour I had all 80GB of data on the new hard drive. This thing is truly a life saver.

The only thing that gave me problems is on the old hard drive. It wanted me to set the permissions to get to the folders I wanted. I thought it was going to take me forever to do because I thought I would have to do it for each folder, and then each file in the folder. After some tinkering and some trial and error i figured out how to apply the permissions to everything in the folder. From there I had it made.

If you have a motherboard failure and need to get stuff off your old hard drive and onto a new hard drive, I HIGHLY recommend this.

My 6.5 year old desktop died on me last week and I although I have been warned many times that I should regularly back-up my data, I was very lax about doing this (my last back-up was nearly 2 years ago). Of course panic started setting in when I began realizing all of the work documents, photos, TONS of music, etc. that I have added since then. Thankfully after doing some quick research online I learned that as long as the old hard drive was still ok in the desktop (it was), then one of these USB adapter kits was all I needed to retrieve all my old files and move them on to another drive. I had some difficulty removing the old drive from the "slim" tower it was in, but that's because I've never done this before and really doesn't have anything to do with this product. One of the tech sites I was looking at recommended another version of this product made by a different company (sorry their name escapes me at the moment), but upon doing a little more investigating (mainly through customer reviews), I saw that many people had trouble with that brand not working properly and even destroying their HDD altogether (eek!). I came across this model by Vantec on Amazon and saw that most people were giving positive feedback on it so I went ahead and made the purchase.

BEST 2O BUCKS I EVER SPENT!!! All my data is now safely residing on another computer (along with an external back-up) thanks to this device. It's not the prettiest looking thing (definitely a case of "function over form" which is much better than the other way around) and the instructions are a little sparse, but it was easy enough to figure out anyway. In case anyone is wondering, the hard drive I used this on is a Maxtor IDE 3.5" IDE drive. I also should note that this drive was from a Windows XP PC and all the data was transferred to a laptop running Vista and it worked like a charm (no software needed, the laptop immediately recognized it as an external USB drive). I was unsure about where the jumper on the back of the old drive should be set to, so I called Vantec for support (got the number off their web site) and the person I spoke with was extremely knowledgeable and helpful (the jumper should be set to MASTER by the way). I would highly recommend this product based on my experience with it. Hopefully this review can be just as helpful to others who find themselves in this predicament as the other customer reviews here helped me.

I bought this product to copy drive images from older systems to some new 500GB internal drives that I purchased for this purpose. I had some serious problems with copying the images to the drives (through the dongle), with it typically bombing out around 40MB on USB 1.1 systems and around 500MB on USB 2.0 systems. After messing around with it for a few hours (and discovering that smaller files worked just fine), I began to get the feeling that it was a faulty product. After trying another Vantec with the same results, I returned it and bought the very similar product from Bytecc. While I agree with another reviewer that the connectors are better on the Vantec, the Bytecc product actually worked with my multi-GB files, which is kinda the point. Score: Bytecc - 1; Vantec - 0...

This worked very well with two old(er) IDE/PATA drives, taken from dead computers, from which I was trying to recover data. Easy to use, found all the necessary manuals online, and worked pretty much as advertised. I do think you have to be VERY careful about connecting the drive, turning on the power, and making the USB connections in the correct order. And I did have a slight problem that my PC wouldn't always recognize one of the two drives when I plugged in the USB connector, but that could have been something wrong with that drive, not the Vantec device. Using "safely remove hardware," and then reconnecting once or twice seemed to fix the problem. (That's the only reason I didn't give it five stars!) I would not recommend this for semi-permanent configurations, e.g. file servers, because it leaves the disk too exposed, but it's great for maintenance and recovery applications, when you don't want to mess with the time and all the screws, etc., needed to install a drive in a box enclosure.