On the top there is a standard SATA port and a red light that shows when you have an active USB connection between the PC and the Vantec IDE/SATA to USB 3.0 adapter. On one side of the adapter you have the standard IDE/ATA/ATAPI 40-pin interface that is very popular on older desktop 3.5″ hard drives and 5.25″ optical drives. The adapter itself is very small measuring just 2.75-inches by 2.00-inches with a weight of just 1.4 ounces.

Inside the retail packaging you’ll find the IDE/SATA To USB 3.0 adapter, installation guide, SATA Data Cable, 4-Pin Molex to SATA Power Converter, USB 3.0 Cable ( A to Micro B ), and the AC power adapter. IDE & SATA 1.5Gb/s, SATA 3Gb/s, SATA 6Gb/s SSDs, Hard Drives, CD/DVD/Blu-ray Drives Hot-Swappable: Plug & Play Without Rebooting In laymen’s terms, it went from a theoretical 60 MB/s to 640 MB/s!

This increases the transfer rates from up to 480 Mbps with USB 2.0 all the way up to 5 Gbps with USB 3.0. Rather than re-inventing the wheel, Vantec changed out the USB 2.0 controller with a newer USB 3.0 controller inside the adapter. How do you make this product better? You add SuperSpeed USB 3.0 support! Not bad and the little adapter that costs $18.99 shipped has earned a 4.4 out of 5 stars rating on Amazon with 1,277 customer reviews since being introduced in 2007. The small adapter was ingenious as it ensured that you should always have a way to connect drives to your desktop or laptop without opening a case or fiddling about the inside of your PC to get it connected to the motherboard. Vantec even included an external power brick to power 5.25″ optical drives and 3.5″ hard drives with this external adapter.

Vantec came up with a nifty little product called the Vantec SATA/IDE to USB 2.0 Adapter (part number CB-ISATAU2) years ago that allowed you to take any SATA or IDE drive and connect it to your PC through a USB 2.0 data port. All storage drives fail at some point and there is likely a situation where you wanted to connect a drive to your computer to work on, but couldn’t easily do so.

Driver usb to ide adapter