With this cable, I was able to connect power to both hard drives, without needing 2 AC adapters. A quick trip to Radio Shack and $5 resulted in a Y-adapter power cable. Connecting the interface cable was not a problem, it was only when I went to connect power to both of them, that I realized that I only had one power connector and two devices needing power. My second test involved the Hitachi SATA drive and Western Digital Caviar IDE drive.
The cool part about being able to connect 2 drives at once, is the fact that you can copy / move files between them. Both drives spun up and appeared on my desktop. The little Toshiba does not require power, so setup was a snap. My first test consisted of the Hitachi SATA drive and 2.5 in Toshiba IDE drive.
Cables to go usb to ide Pc#
Once all connections are made, the drive should spin up, and then automatically mount as a removable drive on your PC or Mac computer (all my testing was conducted on a 20″ iMac G5). Connect the SATA or IDE cable to the matching connector on the drive, plug in the power plug into the drive’s power port (if one exists), and then plug in the USB cable. Hooking up a single drive is a simple operation. I’ll be testing with a 3.5 inch Western Digital Caviar 80gb IDE drive, a 2.5 inch Toshiba 40gb IDE drive and a 3.5 inch Hitachi Deskstar 80gb SATA drive. The test candidates for this review are shown above. Two IDE devices at one time will not work. Two at once though, will work as long as it is an IDE and an SATA device. Ah, great minds think alike! But alas, 3 at once is not possible. At this point you might be thinking that since this cable has 3 different connection points, that it might be possible to plug in 3 different devices at the same time.