Recently I had to move my 'drawer of junk' from a file cabinet to a small box in the closet. While transferring the goodies, I found a 250 gig hard drive that I had purchased a month or two ago with the intention of putting into my HP Media Center PC for more capacity. Unfortunately, when I went to install it, I found that there were no spare drive bays in the machine (cheap HP!).
In any case, while at Best Buy a few days ago, I saw the Adaptec USB 2.0 Hard Drive Enclosure Kit, which takes a standard 3.5” hard drive and make it an external USB 2.0 drive. The price of the kit was about $50, but with the reward zone 'rebates' that I had, it cost me about $20.
When unpacking the kit, I found a CD enclosed, which struck me as strange, and had me a bit worried. After all, this thing shouldn't require drivers, right? Well, much to my relief, the CD apparently contains installation instructions, since none are in the box. I have no desire to actually put the CD in a drive since I'm sure that 90% of the contents are advertising, otherwise it would have been cheaper to slip in a single sheet of installation instructions instead of a CD!
Being the geek that I am, I naturally decided to forgo the instructions and figure out how to get the drive installed.
Turns out it was even easier than I thought. Just unscrew two screws on the back of the case, and the whole internal mechanism slides right out the front. Attach the IDE and power supply cable to the drive, gently lower it into place, making sure to 'fold' the IDE cable in a hump behind the drive, and screw the drive into place. Close it back up and you're all done. The whole process takes about 2 minutes, and that's allowing time to find a small phillips head screwdriver.
I attached the drive to my Windows XP system, and it recognized the drive right away, and then I had to go into Computer Management to format the drive, which is still happening as I write this. Cake.
There are two things that I want to comment on about this product:
1) Unlike my ultra portable and tiny SmartDisk FireLite 40 gig drive, this unit requires an external power supply. Not a surprise, but not ideal either if you're moving the drive between machines.
2) No rubber feet are included with the kit! So if I were to put this thing on top of my Antec Sonata case, it would scratch the heck out of it. Either I need to put some rubber footies on the thing, or keep it in the stand that it includes, which at least is plastic and shouldn't scratch things with quite as much enthusiasm as the aluminum chassis of the kit.