I read nearly all the reviews on this little tool and decided that more than enough folks had found it functional to take a chance on it. Not much of a chance really as it costs next to nothing. If it didn't work, no great loss. If it did, then a great buy... Work? Oh yeah! Right out of the box this minuscule unit hooked up to 11 different old hard drives that have been sitting in a box for as much as 18 years in one case. Worked with every single one of them! Set up and connection is child's play for a lobotomized sea slug. Someone in one review complained that the instructions weren't adequate. Apparently that reviewer is the type of person who has issues with 'Insert tab A into slot B'. It's that simple. All you need to be aware of with older drives is the jumper position ( remember jumpers? ). With Western Digital brand drives, remove the jumper entirely for 'Single'. On the other brands I had ( Seagate, Maxtor, Quantum), I found that setting the jumper to 'Master' was correct.

It takes a minute or two for your PC to recognize the USB connection just like any USB device. When it does, a drive letter is assigned to the now active drive and you can read the Directories, Files and other data just as if it was a standard internal or external drive. That data can be transferred to other drives in your system just as with any drive to drive data transfers.

The unit comes with a variety of power connectors for the various power connections on different types of drives.

Simply put, this inexpensive little tool is a big, powerful piece of hardware. No techno geek, computer nerd or long time power user with boxes full of long silent hard drives should be without this little gem. As for any IT guys who never know what they will run into on the job, it could be a lifesaver. The whole unit and all cables fit in a 4"x8"x2" box and weighs less than a Quarter Pounder with cheese. No excuse not to have one in your emergency computer repair kit.

great for setting up my computers. Thanks

I used it to upsize several SATA bootable drives. In one example I went from a 160G HD to 240G SSD, and this was done by pulling the original HD from the netbook and plugging it into the standalone box along with the inbound SSD, then pressing the button for 3-seconds to start. The box does come with a USB cable, but it is needed for the initial step. It is used for mounting one or both drives into the directory of a host computer, where one can view and use them just like any other USB drive.

As discussed by others, the new drive gets partitioned as the old one was, so I rounded up a command-line utility (DiskPart included in WindowsXP/7/etc) and extend the partition out. Note that this utility and others will not allow you to change a partition on a currently active boot drive. Therefore I wouldn't want to immediately install the new drive back into my one-slot machine. Instead the USB cable is used to mount the drive onto a bootable machine, possibly this machine with the old drive reinstalled, then extend the partition. Now we are finally ready to swap in the new larger drive permanently.

Can the USB cable be used to clone the old drive before taking it out? Yes, however two issues. First, is that if your machine's USB port is only 2.0, then its going to take awhile. For instance, I've got that 500G clone-over-2.0 job going right now that is calculated to last 9 hours. For comparison, doing this using the stand-alone configuration would be perhaps 30 minutes tops. The second issue is that this KingWin product did not come with any host application software for doing this over-USB maneuver. Instead I went and pulled a (free) cloning app off the internet. However this was actually necessary for still another reason.

Although the KingWin is great at upsizing drives, a very common need, it refuses to go the other direction. In my other example, I cloned a 500G drive over to a fresh 1T drive. Initially then, the 1T drive has the same 500G partition as the original. Now keep the 500G partition, and wipe/format the original 500G drive, and then try the clone back the reverse direction. The red light on the smaller target goes out and all four blue lights flash unendingly, which I guess (because documentation is minimal) means that we are not proceeding any further. Hence the need for (free) cloning software that can in fact yank a 500G partition off a 1T drive and send it over to a 500G drive. So long as neither the source drive nor the destination are the drive your machine has booted off of. Got it?

I have used this adapter for years. I worked for a small brokerage company and when Windows XP was no longer supported we had to upgrade to Windows 7 Pro. I set up one computer with all of the required software and then used this adapter from Kingwin to clone the hard drive to another hard drive to be placed in the other user's computers. It worked flawlessly and there were no problems with any of the other installations.

One reason I used this adapter versus others is that this one is not only USB 3.0, but it has 2 SATA ports and 1 IDE port instead of 2 IDE ports and 1 SATA port like some other adapters I looked at.

I just recently upgraded an old HP laptop to a new SSD hard drive. Because it is an older model, installing Windows 10 was not working (it would not work with Windows 11 according to Microsoft). There were driver problems and unrecognized hardware problems. I used this adapter to clone the old hard drive to the new SSD hard drive and the laptop is working better than ever.

I am so impressed by what this adapter has enabled me to do with it, I bought a second one just in case I lose this one or I manage to break it!

I had a old IDE hard drive I removed from my broken computer. It had lots of photos and music I needed to extract and copy to my new computer. This adapter worked great and was simple to use. I just plugged the old hard drive into one end of the adapter and pluged the other end into the new computer via a USB cable. After attaching the power supply (provided) I could see the contents of the old drive on my new computer. Even though I probably won't need this gadget again, for a mere $17, it was soooo worth it. The only problem I ran into, was the USB cable included in the package was defective. It took me several hours of fidgeting to figure this out but one I used a new cable, the device worked perfectly. Also, I was disappointed with the lack of a technical support number to call a speak to a live person. The instuctions/website only offer support via email. One other thing, as some reviewers mentioned...I had to completely remove the jumper from my western digital drive in order for the computer to recognize it.