…but I’ll link to him so you can find him.

Now, on to the time killing….

Since I’ve got so much time between when my stuff should’ve been delivered and when it’s likely to, and all….

UPS, you see, has a funny definition of ‘three days’.

Anyway…I got this nifty new gadget — a USB2.0 to IDE adapter kit. It’s got a USB cable that ends in a little adapter with one side for regular drives and one side for what I assume is laptop harddrives. It’s also got a power supply thing that plugs into the wall and supplies power to the harddrive.

It was cheap, and it looked damned neat, so I thought I’d give it a try because…well, whenever there’s a computer problem, it always seems like I have to break open my computer and put strange harddrives into my system. Now I won’t have to do that.

Yay.

This product is from Bytecc, and, if you have enough brains to find your way around the reallyfuckingawful english that’s all over the packaging and the manual [which is contained on the otherwise useless — unless you have Windows 98 — mini-CD in the box], it doesn’t suck. It took me two tries to get my computer to recognise the harddrive, but I’m currently transferring quite a bit of stuff from an old 27 gb NTFS formatted drive.

The manual itself, and quite a few reviews, say that it only works with FATwhatever drives. This does not seem to be the case. Some reviews also say that it’s flaky. I suspect that the other reviews, which recommend a specific order for plugging things in — are probably the best solution for that flakiness. That, and, well, sometimes windows is just that way, y’know? Sometimes it takes me a minute or two to get the damned USB pen drive to work.

I went from wall to harddrive with the power supply, then I plugged in the IDE end of the USB to IDE cable, then I plugged in the USB cable. That seems to work quite nicely.

I’m not sure I recommend this product as an ‘external harddrive on a budget’ solution, as drives do tend to reach a rather uncomfortable-to-human-touch temperature and probably shouldn’t be left sitting around on hard surfaces for long periods of time while running, but as a salvage/fixit type tool, it seems to be excellent. Also, I’m thinking it would probably be okay for a sort of…short-term-hook-up external solution. Like, if you had a great deal of stuff you wished to store somewhere, and happened to have an extra drive sitting around. Move stuff onto that, and shelve it somewhere safe.

I have not tested this product with CD or DVD drives, but I’ve heard that it works well for them. I’ll have to try it out once I’m done moving things around on this old 27.