Review on 💻 SATA/IDE to USB 3.0 Adapter by Unitek - Universal 2.5"/3.5" IDE and SATA Hard Drive Adapter, Support up to 10TB by Micheal Esquivel

This adapter works great! The listing shows several different models, I have an externally powered model with three heads to support 2.5" and 3.5" SATA and IDE and that model is the Unitek Y-3324. It seems to work fine for several drives I've tried. I also have another unpowered SATA USB adapter that works for SSDs but not always for spinning drives as my USB ports are underpowered. For these drives, the Unitek power adapter worked perfectly! I also have a few drives in old clunky external cases and some of the power supplies in those cases have failed over the years. I took the drives out of those cases, attached them to the Y-3324 and they popped up right away. Sweet. In the Q&A list, one or two people mentioned drives that aren't available for this adapter, and I offer a few ideas. One possibility, of course, is that the drive is dead. Another possibility - if a drive letter shows up - is that the drive needs to be reformatted (and all data will be lost, of course). But a third possibility is that the drive was protected by a hard drive password set in the BIOS of the PC or laptop from which the drive was originally installed. If it's true that it's password protected, you won't see any indication in Windows that the drive is there. If you know the password, you can reinstall the drive on the original PC and use the password to disable/remove password protection. After that, it will be displayed normally externally on the Unitek adapter. If you don't know the password, there are several master password reset methods on the internet, but I'm not sure if these methods work, and most or all indicate that all drive data will be lost.