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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 | 2 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
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