Review on Coolgear SATA and IDE Hard Drive & Optical Drive USB 2.0 Adapter Kit - Convert 2.5, 3.5, & 5.25 Drives Easily by William Rothstein

I retired seven old PCs and wanted to make sure the drives were erased. I used the CoolGear® SATA and IDE COMBO USB Hard Drive and Optical Drive Adapter Kit: Limited Edition Pro Series Aluminum Enclosure to connect each legacy drive to my current system and transfer all relevant legacy data from the legacy drive to my current drive copy; The system sees CoolGear and the old drive as a USB drive. I then used some free software (DiskWipe) to wipe the old hard drive - it takes a while but you just run the wipe function and let it go. Some older 40GB drives took about an hour - I did multiple erase passes. Large (180GB, 300GB) up to several hours. My Windows 7 system failed to identify some old Western Digital drives (in fact, it didn't "see" CoolGear and the old drive in MyComputer at all). To solve this problem, I searched for "Partition" in the Control Panel and the drive was visible there. I had to choose options to make the drive available etc. From that point on I could access the data on the drive to copy it and then use DiskWipe to wipe the drive. The "pluggable" connection you are using. Plugging a CoolGear device into the back of an old drive is a bit flimsy, but once you've securely plugged it in, it works just fine. All of these were 3.5 inch drives. I still have a few old 2.5" laptop drives that need erasing, but I don't expect any problems with them. I still have an old 300GB drive that I can use with the CoolGear device as a backup for my current system. One more note: I had trouble getting one of the old drives out of the computer case, so I just plugged CoolGear into the drive while it was in the old computer and the CoolGear connection worked fine. Very handy and easy to use device.