IOMAX USB 2.0 to SATA/IDE Adapter with Power Adapter for 2.5/3.5/5.25 inch SATA or IDE Drive

I managed to access drives I thought were 'Bricked' for sure, as well as old storage devices no longer catered for and grabbed some great old photos of my GF on holiday (thank you, thank you, thank you)However, ever since that possiblr 'beginners luck' I have struggled even with drives I know to be fine. Understandably, given what the product does, there are many ports and connectors.I say, approach it with a clear head, after a good sleep and a friend who's an expert in this sort of thing.Final message is, don't give up on your long lost and lovingly lamented files, this set of kit may well give you them back.

I had a non-standard use for this piece of kit.I stripped down an old Sky box and removed the hard drive (turned out to be a standard SATA Seagate Pipeline HD 500gb) and wanted to connect it to a Raspberry Pi computer board. I had read of all sorts of difficulties in getting the Pi to connect with SATA drives but, for the price of this adaptor, it was worth a try.I first of all, connected the adaptor and drive to a Windows 10 computer and it worked straight away. It immediately showed the drive with all the Sky folders on it.I reformatted the drive and then connected it to the Pi.After about 10 seconds, the Pi recognised it and the drive worked exactly as hoped for. No adjustments or extra code needed.I can only say that the adaptor works beautifully both with Windows based machines and Linux boards like the Raspberry Pi.The only drawback is that there are two awkward trailing wires between the host machine, the adaptor and the mains supply point, but that cannot be avoided.Note that if you have a computer that offers a USB 3 socket, then there are simpler and cheaper ways of doing this (mains supply unnecessary) but USB 2 sockets do not deliver enough power to spin the HDD, especially if it is a 3,5 inch one.I might now strip down my old YouView box to see if there is a larger drive in that.....

This really does allow you to plug in an old hard drive to your PC via USB. You don't need any other components, this comes with everything and works with both IDE and SATA drives.It comes with:- A power supply. You plug it into an ordinary plug socket, the other end plugs into the back of the hard drive. There's an adapter at the end of the wire that lets you switch between IDE or SATA.- The device itself, which connects directly to the back of the hard drive as well (IDE 2.5/3.5/5.25 inch or SATA), and has a USB wire hanging out the back of it to go into your PC/laptop/tablet/toaster/spaceship.I plugged in a 10 year old IDE drive into my PC's USB socket using this thing, it took Windows about 10-15 seconds to recognise that something was going on and a new drive popped up like it had belonged there for years. Transferring thousands of files from the drive to my newer drives was pretty quick, too.

Bought it to rifle through some of my old hard drives for files I hadn't copied to my newest machine. Seems to be reasonable quality and the data transfer is adequately fast (I haven't needed to copy huge volumes of data and it's probably limited by the speed of the old drives anyway). I have my doubts about the quality of the on/off switch on the power lead and am leaving it in the "on" position and toggling the power at the socket. The IDE 3.5" fitting is a bit tight on some hard drives but that may be the tolerances on the drive rather than the adapter. Bottom line is that it works and should be okay for light use but I wouldn't expect it to last long in a corporate environment.

Does what it says on the tin. Connected drive, power, laptop and was up and running in minutes. I have mainly SATA drives and it worked perfectly. I have not tried it with an older IDE disk yet but don't envisage any problems. Next step is to get a few drive enclosures to keep the disks safe (from static).

This is an excellent piece of kit, just what I need to check out old hard drives I've got laying around the house. I've got a couple of antique IDE drives, no idea what's on them, but I'm not ready to throw them away as I'm pretty sure there might be some family photos on them. I've also got several SATA laptop hard drives, again, no idea whats on them. So I invested in this handy piece of kit.Works perfectly, there are connections for 2.5 IDE, 3.5 IDE and SATA, and the supplied power brick has separate feeds for power to both IDE and SATA. Dead simple to use, I had the external drives connected via USB to my laptop in seconds, and I could read the drives perfectly. All data I wanted to keep copied off, formatted the external drives, then binned the old IDE 3.5 bricks and kept the 2.5 laptop drives for another day.Anyone who works in IT should have one of these, and anyone who's got old hard drives laying about could also use it. Get one tomorrow, you won't regret it.

An excellent item especially given the price. My PC had stopped working but I was able to extract the hard drive. This item enabled me to access the data on that hard drive just like a USB stick. I have also used it successfully on some old hard drives I had of both types. I have deducted one star because of the instructions and that one of the connections was very tight. I was hesitant about how hard to push it in but eventually it went in and once it did this unit worked very very well.

I was using an old Western Digital IDE drive with my PlayStation 2 and somehow managed to brick it when installing a game, so I needed a method to connect the drive to a modern PC so I could format it and sort it out. This device does just that! I initially couldn't format the drive or initialize it in Win 7 Disk Management and kept getting an error, but just changing the USB port managed to sort that out so if you don't get any joy at first please explore that option. Device is well made and does the job I needed from it. I should mention for those using IDE drives that the SATA power connector on this device actually detaches and the needed Molex power is inside it! No mention in the manual and a bit of trial and error to find it! :D