Universal drive adapters are becoming a must have accessories for not just the IT guy at your work but also for anyone with a PC or Mac. With hard drives becoming larger in capacity and cheaper in price, swapping them out and upgrading to a new drive is easier than ever before. Keeping the old drive around for archive purposes is great but it’s when you need it that becomes a drag. Hooking up all the cables (or the pain of just sliding it into the slot on the Mac Pros…yes, pain ) can be a hassle for just a quick copy to the new drive. With universal drive adapters, all you have to do is plug the adapter into the old drives IDE or SATA connector, hook up the power and bingo, up comes your drive in My Computer or on your Mac Desktop. Just like that.

NewerTech will be showing off its newest connector with convenient and easy to read status lights at Macworld 2008. This is a nice addition to the other adapters I have used that leave you wondering if you have even a valid USB connection let alone know if your data is streaming though the cables. Working with any 2.5˝, 3.5˝, or 5.25˝ hard drive or optical drive (standard IDE/ATA/ATAPI 40 pin or Serial-ATA), the NewerTech adapter connects to a USB port of any computer working with USB 2.0, 1.1, and 1.0 ports. NewerTech told SvenOnTech that the, “USB 2.0 Universal Drive Adapter has been tested to work with all hard drive brands, including Maxtor, Seagate, IBM, Hitachi, Samsung, Western Digital, and Fujitsu; optical drive brands, including LG, Lite-On, Panasonic, Pioneer, Plextor, Sony, Teac, and Toshiba; and removable media drives, such as Iomega Zip. The adapter provides a USB 2.0 transfer speed of up to 480Mbps and is also backwards compatible with USB 1.1.”

The adapter will be available for $29.95 and more information can be found at NewerTech’s Universal Drive Adapter site.

SvenOnTech will be stopping by the booth and talking to NewerTech’s CEO Grant Dahlke at Macworld. Stay tuned for more from that interview.

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