As regular readers will know, I have a certain enthusiasm for plug-and-go gadgets that turn ATA (IDE) devices into USB ones, or do related interface-bending tricks. Not that I make a religion out of them, or anything. I realise that a simple external drive box is a much better, and not necessarily any more expensive, option if you want semi-permanent transportable storage. But it's still cool that devices exist that let you turn a nude ATA drive into a USB storage device in, literally, seconds. These things are handy low-level geek tools for those moments when, y'know, you've got this machine in pieces for a motherboard upgrade, and you've just realised there's stuff on its drive that you need to access on that machine, and you don't want to shut that machine down and take the side off and unplug one of its drives (because its ATA cables are fully populated, of course) and push the cases together and string a ribbon cable across the gap, or unscrew this machine's drive and sit it on some cardboard in the bottom of that machine's casing, then boot that machine again, just to get those 27 stupid kilobytes of data. With a USB-IDE cable, you can power up a drive by itself whether it's screwed into a PC or not, hot-plug it into another running computer, shift your data (well, possibly after a brief stop in Disk Management to import the foreign disk, if you're running a recent Windows flavour), unplug it again, and get on with your day. read more
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