A simple external drive box is a much better, and not necessarily any more expensive, option if you want semi-permanent transportable storage. But it's still cool that devices exist that let you turn a nude ATA drive into a USB storage device in, literally, seconds.

These things are handy low-level geek tools for those moments when, you know, you've got this machine in pieces for a motherboard upgrade, and you've just realised there's stuff on its drive that you need to access on that machine, and you don't want to shut that machine down and take the side off and unplug one of its drives (because its ATA cables are fully populated, of course) and push the cases together and string a ribbon cable across the gap, or unscrew this machine's drive and sit it on some cardboard in the bottom of that machine's casing, then boot that machine again, just to get those 27 stupid kilobytes of data.

With a USB-IDE cable, you can power up a drive by itself whether it's screwed into a PC or not, hot-plug it into another running computer, shift your data (well, possibly after a brief stop in Disk Management to import the foreign disk, if you're running a recent Windows flavour), unplug it again, and get on with your day.

It's essentially the same thing as the other USB-IDE cable. One data cable for your drive and your USB port, one power adapter. The data cable enters the IDE-plug end from the side, for reasons that'll become clear in a moment. The cable entry is on the other side from the place where you'll be putting the power plug.

This device is USB v2.0 compatible, of course. It works with USB 1.1 as well, but then you're not likely to quite be able to shift even one megabyte of data per second, at which speed your 300 gigabyte fansubbed anime collection will take four days to copy.

The power adapter cable terminates in a four pin "Molex" connector. Only three of the Molex plug pins are connected, but that's OK; the two middle pins are redundant earths to reduce resistance. They're connected together on all drive circuit boards, and when you're just running a single drive it's fine to cut costs by only connecting one pin.

This package also, by the way, contains a 77mm mini-CD driver disc, which may be of use to Win98 users, or may not; my devotion to journalistic excellence is insufficient for me to bother checking. Everyone using vaguely recent versions of Windows or Mac OS shouldn't need any extra drivers to use any modern ATA/USB adapter; USB storage drivers are built into the operating system. Linux ought not to be a problem either, but that depends on the bridge hardware chipset in the adapter cable, the Linux version you're using, and possibly also the thread count of your bedsheets.

The package has a Unique Selling Point is that on the other side of its standard 40 pin data plug is... another plug.

This is a 44 pin ATA plug, as used on 2.5 inch laptop drives. There are more than 44 pins on the back of a 2.5 inch drive, but the extra four in a separate block to the right of the main bunch of 44 are "vendor specific" and do, to a first approximation, nothing. The four rightmost pins of the laptop connector carry power. Since laptop drives don't need much power, a powered USB port should be enough to run them.

Connecting the adapter is as simple as connecting any other USB-IDE widget, unless you're hooking it up to a laptop drive, whereupon it's even simpler because you don't need the power adapter. Connect data cable to drive, connect power cable to drive, wait for drive to spin up, plug USB lead into computer. The USB lead's only a couple of feet in length, but you can use an extension lead with it if that's not enough.

As long as the drive you're connecting to is set to Master, the data side is plug-and-go. The power side's about as simple; the R-Driver power adapter is a world-compatible unit, and it's got a standard IEC socket on it, so you can use any spare computer power lead you've got lying around to run it.

If you don't happen to have a spare IEC lead, make sure you get your package with the right kind of power cable. Please quote it in payment note or else we will send out adapter plug according to your country.