Another area where the user manual is wrong is where it tells you to install a driver if you want to use this product with a Mac. This product is compatible with PCs and Macs. The correct way to connect the drive to your computer is to plug in the IDE cable to the drive, plug in the power to the drive and then plug the USB connector into the computer. Here you see the connector plugged into one of the drives, and the included power adapter plugged into the power port on the same drive. I don’t think it really matters if the drive is set to Master or Slave, it worked fine for me either way. The drive on top doesn’t have any information for setting the jumpers. The drive on the bottom in the picture above has a sticker that shows how to arrange the jumpers for Master or Slave mode.

You’ll also notice that there are little plastic jumpers to the right side of the IDE connector, and then to the right of the jumpers there is the power connector.Īccording to the very terse one page user manual (sheet) included with this cable, you are supposed to make sure the drive is in Master mode. So, just make sure you pay attention to what you’re doing. At least this was something that I was able to do with the 2 drives I tested it with. Unfortunately, even with the ‘key’, you can still plug the connector in upside down. This notch is supposed to keep you from plugging in the IDE cable incorrectly, as the connector has a matching ‘key’ to the notch. There is a notch in the middle of plastic surrounding the pins.

If you look closely at the picture above, you can see that the IDE connectors on the drives are keyed.

I hadn’t booted up the computer in ages and didn’t even recall if I had copied all the files off the two 3.5 inch drives before retiring the computer. My first test of this product, was to I pull the drive cage out of an old 800MHz Athlon desktop that I had laying around. Supports 3.5, 2.5 Hard Disks, CD-ROM(max. That’s really the only difference with this newer version and the older version. One side is for 3.5 inch drives and the other is for 2.5 inch (notebook) drives. This new version has a double sided connector. The first version only allowed for connections to devices using a full-sized IDE connector. Version 2 has the same features as the original version, but adds one important feature to the mix. For those of you that might recall the first review, this is a cable that allows you to connect an IDE device to your computer via a USB port.

Bytecc usb to ide