Apricorn's DriveWire: A Hard Drive 'Swiss Army Knife'
A quick Sunday shout-out to Apricorn, whose DriveWire Universal Hard Drive Adapter (model number ADW-USB-KIT) has received frequent use of late by yours truly:
This cool little widget offers three different HDD interfaces:
- 2.5" PATA (40-pin),
- 3.5" PATA (44-pin), and
- SATA
It translates them into USB2 for external connectivity to a Mac or PC. Not shown in the picture, but also included, are:
- a USB cable (duh),
- a beefy AC adapter,
- Apricorn’s EZ Gig II HDD cloning software for Windows,
- ShirtPocket Software’s SuperDuper cloning software for OS X, and
- detailed instructions
I’ve used both EZ Gig II and SuperDuper in the past with excellent results. I haven’t yet run into LBA-induced 128 GByte-max capacity limitations that plagued other USB2 adapters I’ve used in the past. And you can’t beat the price; $29.99 after rebate (through the end of this month) direct from Apricorn, as well as from numerous retailers. Just be careful not to short out any of the exposed hard drive controller circuitry that’s normally protected by virtue of the HDD being installed in a system!
A protective (aka non-conductive) piece of paper in-between the PCB and whatever’s beneath the HDD works well for me.
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