Do you have an old hard drive lying around that should be doing something useful? Instead of taking up perfectly good space on the shelf, why not throw one in your bag for data storage on the go? With this USB cable adaptor, you don’t need to pay the premium for an external hard drive case, plus you get an array of connections to choose from to suit your drive, be it optical or magnetic.

This, of course, assumes you won’t be transporting hard drives around daily with little regard for their longevity, in which case a proper enclosure is essential. But for occasional and non-critical tasks, a cable adaptor like this one is dirt cheap and effective.

Care must always be taken when moving hard drives, especially during operation, as most have an exposed circuit board. Anecdotally, one of the first pieces of hardware accidentally destroyed in our labs was an internal IDE drive mounted externally on our test bench, after moving it while it was powered up. We haven’t had a repeat performance since then because we ensure the surfaces our drives rest on are clean. The same logic applies here, and you may want to grab a bag of some description for added security.

The adaptor accepts SATA, 40-pin 3.5” IDE and 43-pin 2.5” IDE drives, and can even run a SATA and IDE drive at the same time (but not two IDE drives). The adaptor has an external power pack, although you could also use any left over power connectors (Molex or SATA, whichever your drives need) from your box’s innards. Simply plug in the drive to the adaptor, turn on the power and then plug the USB 2.0 cable from the drive adaptor to a spare USB 2.0 port. And voila, you’ve now got a very cheap external hard drive! It’s such a simple concept we wonder why it hasn’t been done sooner.

Plugging in a spare Maxtor MaXLine III SATA150 as a test, Windows detected the drive without any issues, and a quick run of HDTach showed a rather brisk transfer rate of 33.4MB/sec. This is more than fast enough for your data transferring needs.

This gadget is a great idea made manifest. It’s a dream for doing backups to external hard drives, taking a hard drive over to a friend’s place to share files, or just hooking up extra storage when and as you need it. We like them so much, we’re using some of these in the labs now.

Just remember to place drives on a stable platform, and don’t let them sit too long without airflow, as you can cook a drive’s electronics if it’s sitting on a surface that doesn’t let it breathe.