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USB Universal Drive Adapter

Tool brings new life to older disk drives

Randy Frank, Contributing Editor -- Design News, April 30, 2007

With the need to store an increasing amount of stuff, it is almost inevitable that an internal drive, which once had an incredible amount of capacity, will be displaced by an even newer drive with even more capacity. The old drive still functions, so a tool that allows users to easily interface it to a computer seems like a natural design idea. Newer Technology (NewerTech) engineers thought so and designed a USB Universal Drive Adapter (UDA) kit to simplify the job. Instead of discarding the drive or buying an enclosure for it, the kit quickly puts the old drive back to work.

The kit comes with the UDA, a power supply, a power cable, a Serial Advanced Technology Attachment (ATA) cable and a Serial ATA power adapter cable. Three built-in connectors in the UDA allow it to connect to any 2.5-inch drive with a mini 44-pin connector or a 3.5 or 5.25-inch hard drive or optical drive that uses a standard Integrated Drive Electronics (IDE)/ATA/ ATA Packet Interface (ATAPI) 40 pin or 7-pin Serial-ATA to a host computer via USB. While 2.5-inch drives are within the USB 2.0 power handling capability, the power supply handles the increased power requirements of other drives.

Tested to work with all hard drive brands, the UDA provides a USB 2.0 transfer speed of up to 480 Mbps and is also backward compatible with USB 1.1. The adapter provides emergency access to an old drive or data transfer from drives removed from failed computers. At a cost of $24.95, the adapter is a bargain compared to the cost of an enclosure for the old drive.

	With three different connectors built into it and additional support hardware in the kit, NewerTech's Universal Drive Adapter connects 2.5, 3.5 and 5.25-inch storage devices to any Apple/Mac or PC with an available USB port.

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