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Quick, Easy Access to Bare Hard Drives
By Dave Peterson | January 26, 2009
I’ve had remarkably good luck with hard drives in my years of computing experience. Almost always, another part of a system dies on me first, and if not easily replaced, I’m looking to port the data on the still good drive some where else. This past weekend, I had the opportunity to use a nifty little utility gadget I picked up a while back.
The Apricorn DriveWire is a hard drive bridge connector that will attach to SATA drives, 44-pin PATA/IDE 2.5″ drives or 40-pin PATA/IDE 3.5″ drives, and pass the data to your computer on a USB 2.0 connection. Power is suppled through an included standard hard drive power plug. Connect it directly to the drive if it’s got a power port, or to the Drive wire if it’s a smaller drive that takes power through the main interface. Just take your bare drive, plug it into the appropriate interface on the DriveWire. plug in the power, and connect it to your system’s USB port. It’s treated just like an external USB drive and gives you the ability to access or transfer your data to another drive.
This is obviously not ideal for a long term solution, but for a quick peek at what’s on a bare drive or to transfer data during an upgrade, the Apricorn DriveWire is an incredibly useful and simple-to-use tool. The price is $39.00, but a rebate currently takes $10 off that.
Topics: Computer Accessories | 5 Comments »
May 7th, 2009 at 5:42 am
My son’s laptop is toast. Only boot is safe mode that takes 10 minutes and then still zero access to folders. Probably malware. I remembered I had this little tool. I used it to copy data files off his SATA laptop drive, to an old desktop drive, and then reformat the SATA. With the blank drive back in his laptop, it allowed the original install disk to do its magic. Once all software was reinstalled, used this Apricorn DriveWire to restore the data completely from that old desktop drive. I am my son’s hero thank to Apricorn.
June 1st, 2009 at 5:28 pm
[...] without a good connection solution. Two hundred GB drives are seemingly the new floppy disk. Bare drive dock solutions have been around for a while, and are great for access from a computer, but what if you want to [...]
November 14th, 2010 at 11:13 am
Iwill surely be happy if they tell us how this thing will work on windows vista and windows7.
I have one of this device and it doesn’t work on those OS.
Thanks,
February 26th, 2011 at 8:47 am
This is the easiest drive clone product I have ever used.
this coming from service experience dated back to 1982!
Thanks for a great product.
June 21st, 2011 at 8:22 am
I run my own computer repair business, and this little device has more than paid for itself. It is useful ANYTIME you need to interface with an IDE or SATA drive directly, not just for the purpose of cloning. Software cleanup or simple surface scan can be done remotely via USB to restore a hopelessly corrupted system to booting order. I had an optical drive go out on a laptop and I needed to reinstall windows. I connected the device to a SATA internal optical drive and was able to boot through USB with my windows disc. My only complaint is that the IDE connecters for that trick get in the way of the power adapter and my SATA optical drive died on me.