We bought one of these months ago and it has been a handy diagnostic and troubleshooting device. However, it is very cheaply made. A consistent and troubling issue is that the power connector to the AC adaptor has a very bad fit. We have had to use other power cords and always have to fiddle with it to get it just right so it's under power.

If it had Firewire it would be an instant sell for me. With Firewire I can boot both PowerPC and Intel Macs without issues. With USB, I'm stuck with Mac OS 9 or Intel Mac booting.

I was very excited about this when it first came out last year. I bought one immediately. The power supply did not work. The green light never went on. I didn't think much of it and got a replacement for the whole kit. The first thing I did was plug in the power supply. The light came on, so no problem. After unplugging, I attached a drive and plugged back in. The light on the power supply did not come on and the drive did not spin up. I removed the drive. The power supply light did not come back up. I put the drive back into one of my regular drive cases and the drive did not spin up! The drive was completely dead. Thankfully, I did a little Googling and tried replacing the drive control board with a board from an identical drive. Wouldn't you know it, but it fixed the drive. However, now I had another drive with no control board. I ended up going to eBay and spending $40 on a replacement. I didn't even bother trying to get another replacement from Newertech, not that I would ever connect another drive to one of their products ever again.

So despite what this review says, I would say: don't buy this unless you are willing to face the possibility of a dead hard drive. There is something wrong with the power supplies included with this. You definitely get what you pay for.

Steve

I am the Guest who wrote "Do not buy this!!!" I accidentally posted without logging in. If you are even considering this product, please read my comments.

Steve

I bought this thing and I like it a lot. The instruction sheet that came with it said to set my drive's jumpers to "Master." When I did one of my two formatted partitions disappeared. I put the jumper back to the default "Cable Select" position and it works great. The drive is a new Seagate 320G PATA. I got it to back up my eMac's hard drive. Sure I can't boot with this adapter, but for doing backups it's been great. It connects to any PATA or SATA HD. Cool! What do you want for $25? If you want a similar firewire solution, get the WiebeTech ComboDock for $170.

If you read this, send a note to potter at surfacingNOSPAM dot com. Your comment was deleted, but I wanted to know if you had the same problem I do now.

I just got one of these UDA kits and hooked it up to a BRAND NEW Seagate 120 GM PATA drive. Backed up 115 GB of data to the drive and everything seemed fine.


Now, three days later and the drive is completely DEAD. Won't get power or spin up. Thanks, OWC!

Bah, the posts were just hidden.

Yup, looks like the same exact problem. Crap.

it, too, is dead. The power supply does not work. It may have ruined one of my drives (i haven't tested the drive yet in a normal enclosure)...

VERY CHEAPLY MADE PRODUCT!!!

I bought one and it didn't work. I had to ship it back to NewerTech. They sent me a replacement which doesn't work. I just emailed them this morning. I haven't heard from them about what to do...

I think I would just like a refund. Hopefully they are cool like that.

OS 10.4.3 and later will boot via USB 1.1 and 2.0, on almost all Macs starting with the slot-loading iMac and the Powerbook G3 Firewire (in other words, NOT the B&W G3, the PCI G4, the clamshell iBook, and the Powerbook G3 Wallstreet and Lombard). A USB drive won't always appear in Startup Disk, but it will appear in Startup Manager (what you get when you hold down the Option key at powerup, before the Mac's screen lights up, and keep it held down until you get a screen showing all attached bootable volumes).