Wait, before you throw out that old hard drive...

(Credit: Newer Technology, Inc.)

Wondering why you haven't junked that old PC collecting dust in the corner of your room? Because you knew one day you would harvest it for parts, right? With a $25 kit from NewerTech you can give its hard drive a second life as an external drive, or grab any data you may have left on it without the trouble of connecting it to your current PC's motherboard. Without so much as a turn of a thumbscrew, NewerTech's USB 2.0 Universal Drive Adapter lets you access your old drive--via USB 2.0. The adapter works with both IDE and SATA drives, and with both 2.5-inch laptop drives and 3.5-inch hard drives. (It works with optical drives, too.) And it works--without the need for drivers--on both PCs and Macs.

For 2.5-inch IDE hard drives, you simply connect the adapter to the drive and then to a USB port on your PC. For 3.5-inch IDE drives and SATA drives, an AC adapter is also needed to draw power from a wall outlet. Hardware reviews site Bigbruin.com ran some benchmarks with various drives connected via NewerTech's adapter and found that while data transfer speeds aren't as fast as a direct connection (particularly for SATA drives), they were certainly fast enough for the convenience provided. Sounds like a bargain to us. (Based on Bigbruin's experience, it would seem that the bugs Macworld editors encountered with early versions of the product last year have been eradicated.) Even cheaper if you are trying to resuscitate an old laptop drive: this $15 enclosure from Macalley.

(Via EverythingUSB.com)

[qprize]

This is news because...?

I've been using an external drive box for almost two years. Two drives, in
fact. One is Firewire, the other combo Firewire/USB. Sure, the SATA/IDE
combo is nice, but who has both of these lying around spare? And you can
always buy adapters.

Anecdotally, the FireWire may not be quite as fast as the internal drive, but
it's never very noticeable, and it's definitely faster than the USB (likely because
the FW connection doesn't need CPU resources like the USB). Best of all, I can
boot my Mac from the FW drives. I can also daisy chain the FireWire,
but not the USB.

Buy a Firewire card if you've got a desktop, get it on a PCcard if you need it
for your laptop. Because any serious external drive uses FireWire.

Oh, yeah. My Metal Gear Box is also really pretty!
http://www.galaxymetalgear.com/images/product_img/3506/3506UC-
BLUE.jpg