FIDECO SATA/IDE to USB 3.0 Adapter, Hard Drive Adapter Cable for Universal 2.5/3.5 Inch IDE/SATA External HDD SSD, 5.25-Inch DVD-ROM/CD-ROM/CD-RW, Support Offline Clone

I've done two main things with this device. I've attached two SATA drives and cloned one to the other using the One Touch button. That worked without issue. You have to have the destination drive be the same size or larger. I also connected multiple drives to the device and then connected the device to a PC to use software for more complicated jobs. You can use a free software like Macrium or Easeus Partition, both of which are easy to use and will allow you to copy partitions from a drive to another without copying the whole disk. If you connect a single SSD (and maybe even a standard mechanical 2.5" disk) to it and connect to a PC, you don't need the power adapter. But if you attach two, you do. If you are doing something time-consuming and resource intensive such as cloning, I would recommend attaching the power cable even if you have only a single drive attached. The only issue I ever had was when I was trying to upgrade my main PC's Windows 7 installation to Windows 10, and the the program would fail because my PC was losing its connection with the attached SSD. I don't recall if that was due to my corrupted Windows 7 installation or if I had neglected to plug in the power adapter. Either way, I got it resolved and was able to complete the transfer. I had loads of trouble getting this Win7 install to upgrade to Win10, but that had nothing to do with this device. When I upgraded another Win7 install to Win10, I pulled the drive out of the laptop and did the One Touch cloning. That worked without any issue at all. I plugged the new drive into the laptop and went about upgrading to Win10 (I didn't want to upgrade the old drive to Win10 just in case there were issues during the upgrade process as there were when I upgraded the OS on my desktop). That upgrade went through without any issue. I had a 3rd laptop running Windows Vista. I wanted to upgrade it to Win7 and then upgrade that to Win10 (you can't go directly from Vista to 10). I ran into two issues, neither of which were related to this device. I ended up using this device quite a bit as I had significant software issues during this upgrade, and I ended up wiping drives and re-cloning multiple times. If you are going to upgrade from Vista to 7 to either stop there or upgrade further, you need to do one of two things if you don't have an advanced format disk and want to move to an AF disk (like a SSD, though it may be the case that any hard drive made today would be AF). If you are running Vista, chances are you do not have an AF disk, so if you want to freshen up an old PC and upgrade your OS and move to a SSD, you need to either upgrade to Win7 on the current disk before cloning or you need to download and install a couple of hotfixes and potentially some additional software. The hotfixes are KB2470478 and KB2553708. You might also need RST driver 9.6 or higher if you have an Intel SATA controller. If you clone first and try to upgrade to Win7, the install will not go through. If you clone first, you can still install the hotfixes, but you'd then have some extra steps because you won't be able to install a hotfix. It's much easier to install the hotfixes before you clone. Now back to this device. I've had it for 7 months. It's worked great for cloning but also for simply attaching a drive to it and then accessing that drive on another computer. I don't have any complaints about it in regards to its intended purpose. The one thing I would say, though, is that I wish they had included a cord, or two cords, to connect a SATA drive in a machine to this device. As it is, you connect the device directly to the drives, no cables involved (other than with the IDE drives and the power connector). I had an SSD in a desktop and had to install it with a 2.5" to 3.5" adapter so that it would sit in the case. This meant that if I wanted to clone that drive, I'd have to remove it from my case. However, if I could connect the device to the drive via cables, that would add flexibility to this. Granted, this is an edge case, and I assume that most people would be using this device because they want to replace one hard drive with another. Still, it'd be nice if I didn't have to attach all of the drives onto the device itself.

This is a great cloning device, but that's not all it does. It will handle ANY hard drive. There are 2 SATA ports and 1 IDE port that will take a 3.5" or 2.5" IDE drive if you have some really old drives laying around that you need to get data from. The cloning process is very simple. Plug 2 drives into the Source and Target ports and press the Clone button for 3 seconds and away it goes. There are 4 progress indicator lights that show 25, 50, 75 and 100% completed. I cloned a 2.5" 500gb SSD to a 2.5" 500gb SATA drive and it took just under 2 hours. The instructions say that you need to format the target drive before cloning, but that's not necessary, nor do I recommend it. I plugged in an unformatted target drive and it cloned perfectly. It did clone to a formatted drive, but the drive I used was formatted with one partition of 450gb and the rest of the drive unpartitioned. It cloned to the formatted partition but left the unformatted partition untouched. So formatting the drive is not necessary. It does require that you plug in the ac adapter because it won't draw enough power from a USB port. Connecting to a computer is simple with the included USB cable, so you can clone offline or plug it into a computer and use it as an external drive connection. The manual is small, but readable and complete with clear instructions. Very nice product, seems well made and durable.

I love this thing. I didn’t give it 5 stars, only because it doesn’t allow you to copy to a smaller capacity hard drive. You can transfer from a big drive to a smaller laptop drive, no problem, as long as the laptop drive, where you’re transferring to, is the same capacity or larger. If it did, it’s 5 stars, all the way. I’ve seen other, similar products, ones sold to clone systems and I actually bought one, but it failed. That’s why, I don’t even know if there’s a product out there, that uses both 2.5 and 3.5 inch hard drives and can transfer from a larger size drive, to a smaller one and is actually dependable. Hopefully, these folks can accomplish that someday. So, unless I come across another product that can do all I said, I will stick with this. It works very well, seems to be built well, the price is comparable to others and to add a cherry on top, I think it looks Cool. I would definitely refer it to others.

The product itself gets 4 stars and the excellent support I received from FIDECO earns them the fifth star. This worked well with an SSD and a SATA hard drive that I tested it on. However, I bought it to use with 2 old DVD drives I have. One, a Samsung TS-H493A, was made in 2007 and the other, a LG HL-DT-ST BD-RE WH10LS30, in 2010. It did not work with these drives. I contacted FIDECO support. After a couple of emails back and forth. they decided these drives were not compatible with this adapter, so they gave me a refund. All companies should have customer support this good.

Yes, this little box can clone drives but the thing I like best is the ability to quickly connect hard drives externally for initializing, partitioning, formatting, and running diagnostics before mounting them inside a computer. Great little device for 3.5" drives. Most 2.5" drives don't need an external power source using a non-powered adapter (they get their power via the USB connection) but 3.5" drives most likely will require an additional power adapter such as provided by this device. Be careful with the connection jacks on this device as they are a bit flimsy and weak. It wouldn't be hard to damage them if bent abruptly. I typically ensure the device and connected hard drives are laying flat on a non-conductive surface while using it. Further, you don't want to jolt or move the device and connected hard drives while in use possibly jerking a connection loose causing damage to the hard drives or corrupting data. Does what it was designed for just treat it with a bit of TLC. Recommended.

Purchased to clone a HDD to SSD when upgrading PC What's on that HDD on the shelf? Find out now! Worked Flawlessly Pros: - Quick Cloning (relatively) - PC NOT required to clone drives. - Able to connect to multiple formats IDE, SATA, 3.5 and 2.5 - Bonus Feature, can be used to access old HDD/SATA that still had data on them via USB. - Comes with external power supply Con: - Power and Data ports are too close for older IDE drives; I needed to buy a 40 pin Male to Female IDE HDD extension ribbon to read older IDE drives. Highly recommend, would buy again.

Had a friend give me her dad's 22 old Pentium 4 PC - which - the motherboard had expired & she wanted to see if I could pull the data off the 24 year old IDE drive which was in it. Sadly, the partition table was unresponsive & needed rebuilding. This interface saved the day on two counts. It's SUPER fast @ mounting IDE drives & the off-line copy function from IDE to SATA is a life saver. Although the IDE did mount fairly quickly - trying to rebuild the part table was painfully slow & the drive would time out against the buffer. Not really the drives fault - a 24 year old 5400rpm 35gig Maxtor - is going to have its issues. Enter the off-line copy function. Plugged a Samsung 250gb drive into the Sata2 connector - powered up the interface - off-line - meaning disconnected from the laptop I was using - so - in Stand-a-lone mode - held the copy button down for 3sec as per instructions & about 20mins later - had copied the 24 year old Maxtor over to the SATA Samsung - without any issues. Once the copy was done - used another Sata/USB interface to work off the Samsung drive & had to the part table rebuilt in under 20mins. Can't praise this interface enough for coming through for me. Also tried another interface from another vendor - this FIDECO is a CLEAR winner in terms of Speed & it's off-line copy function.

(I gave 5 stars for ease of use but please read the below to see why "Value for money" and "Material quality" received 1 star - I would have given NO stars but I was afraid Amazon wouldn't accept that and I didn't want to possibly have to retype the below.) I purchased this product because I needed multiple disk cloning stations. I already had one Startech disk cloner that I loved but they quit making them. I found this device and purchased 2 of them which meant I had 3 disk cloning stations. We use a 64GB M.2 SSD with a M.2 to 22 pin SATA adapter in order to clone the SSD's (this device uses the standard 22 pin SATA connector as did the Startech device. I connected 3 "Master" SSD's to the 3 cloning stations and then 3 of the M.2 SSD's via the adapter. The Startech cloner worked great as always. This device worked so I thought okay, great. I did 3 more with no problems. Then I had 1 M.2 that would not clone. I thought okay, this is unusual but maybe I had a defective SSD. Then after a few more successful cloning sessions I had another failure. I decided to troubleshoot this SSD. I found a short (0.3xx ohms) on the incoming power rail of the SSD. Sure enough the first failed SSD had the same problem. Now I quit using these devices and just used the Startech device. I cloned 20 M.2 SSD's with the Startech and had no failures. I decided to try these new devices again. After a few clones I had another failure and it also had the short on the voltage rail. I threw these 2 devices in the trash. I have been cloning HDD's and SSD's for quite a while now and only very rarely had any problems, much less a shorted incoming voltage rail - that was a first. Since I had used the M.2 to SATA adapters previously (with no problems) I deduced that these cloners were frying the SSD's. Stay away from these cloners !!!