It’s not that often that I come upon a truly wonderful device that I never knew existed and yet have always needed. The Vantec CB-ISATAU2 is such a device. It’s a universal IDE/SATA hard drive to USB 2.0 converter.

If you’re like me, you have a stack of old hard drives sitting around. And yet it’s a little nerve wracking to open up the case on a perfectly good computer and plug in one of these mystery drives–will it have a virus? will it wreck my computer? will I disturb something else while I’m in there? No more. With this insane box of parts you can take any internal hard drive (and I mean any: PATA, SATA, 2.5″, 3.5″) and run it as a USB 2.0 external drive. Just plug in the dongle and included external power supply. It’s basically an external enclosure without the enclosure.

And the best thing is, it just works. I had an old Caviar 120GB drive that had gone questionable at some point sitting on my desk. I plugged it in–dongle, power, USB–and immediately got four new drives (four partitions on the drive).

As you probably know if you have any interest in a device like this… You should disable Autoplay before doing this because Windows may try to find something to run on each partition if Autoplay is enabled. Also, like any external hard drive, you should stop the device before disconnecting it or powering it down.

Got a crazy box of parts? Then you need this crazy box of parts.