How To Recover Data from Old Hard Drives - Unitek IDE & SATA Adapter

in this video i show you how to recover data from old desktop and laptop hard drives with the unitec hard drive adapter [Music] if you're anything like my family you probably accumulate a lot of old devices with hard drives however just like us you may have lost the original power cable or the device's power supply is now defunct that old computer now sits gathering dust on a shelf for privacy and security reasons you don't want to recycle it without being able to check the contents first so the old device just sits in tech purgatory with the unitec hard drive adapter you can now easily review contents of old hard drives clear them or even set them up as brand new backup devices for your current computer and all for only 35 us the device has been designed with both modern sata 2 hard drives in mind and also older generation of hard drives that use an ide interface with 40 pin and 44 pin connectors plus as a nice addition included with the adapter is a four pin power cable designed for three and a half inch ide drives for those really old devices you have lying around with all three connectors you can simultaneously connect and use three hard drives for the three specifications the adapter supports data transfer rates up to five gigabits per second with the fastest usb connection however it's also backwards compatible with usb 2.0 and 1.1 another nice touch is the ability to connect old internal optical drives should you wish to review old cds and dvds if you have them and you haven't convinced yourself to throw them out yet the device is powered via a 12 volt 2 amp power supply and there's nice clicky on off switch which is necessary so you don't live plug your hard drives hot swapping them can potentially corrupt them one final note before moving on to the setup and performance is that the adapter is designed to work with windows based pcs according to the instructions unfortunately i'm unable to test this device with old mac hard drives for this video my primary use for the adapter was to examine old hard drives and recover any data before reformatting them to recycle them in terms of performance what i wanted it to do it worked perfectly the hard drive fits snugly into the connector and the adapter reads the old drives just like a standard external drive the adapter doesn't quite sit flush on the desk when connected to one drive at a time but it's secure enough that you don't feel like you're going to accidentally disconnect it the data transfer rate is fine over usb 2 using a usb type-a connection depending on the size of the drive if you're reformatting it after you've sifted through the contents it can take some time to do a complete reformat the secondary feature that the adapter includes is one touch backup the adapter comes with a small cd to install software if you have an optical drive or you can go to unitec's website and download it under the product information with the onetouch backup feature you can now use older internal drives like an external drive plugging in a reformatted hard drive enables you to assign a folder on your computer for backup you can then simply press the backup button on the adapter itself and it'll automatically make a copy of everything in that folder the onetouch backup feature is a nice way to reuse old drives you're not quite sure about throwing out or would simply like to give a second lease of life one slight quirk to the user experiences it doesn't seem to store files in a readable format when you just plug in the drive as normal instead to restore the files you can set the directory path on your target computer the files will then be nested under a copy of your c drive or whatever your main drive is one final note i have is simply reformatting your drive might not be secure enough for everyone if you're looking to dispose of your old hardware if you're really keen to make sure an old drive is completely unrecoverable i recommend researching in permanent ways to destroy your hard drive thanks for watching and as always please like this video and subscribe to my channel for more content on the connected home and personal technology [Music] you

Channel: How To Do It Tech

Views: 132,794

Keywords: unitek hard drive adapter, unitek hard drive adapter how to use, unitek usb to sata ide hard drive adapter, unitek ide hard drive adapter, recover data, recover data from hard drive, recover data from formatted hard drive, recover data after formatting hard disk, recover data from ssd, recover data internal hard drive, how to recover data from internal hard drive, hard drive, ide to usb, usb to ide, sata to usb, usb to sata, usb to sata adapter, hard drive adapter, hard disk

Id: cb5iGsFiqF0

Length: 3min 34sec (214 seconds)

Published: Sat Jan 08 2022