Causes windows explorer to freeze intermittently, and the hard drive will unmount and remount itself randomly.
This is sad. I researched 4 highly rated usb to ide/sata adapters, and finally decided on this startech usb 2.0 to sata ide adapter (usb2sataide). Unfortunately, this is not a good product.I used this product on a windows xp system with an old ide hard drive. I connected the ac adapter to the drive (and waited 20 seconds for it to fully spin up like a startech customer service rep said in another review), and then i connected the usb cable to the computer. Each partition on the hard drive mounted as a separate drive in windows (i saw the autoplay popup for each drive). It seemed to be working.However, as i clicked around the directories on the hard drive in windows explorer, sometimes explorer would freeze for 5-15 seconds before it finally listed the contents of a directory. This happened several times as i was clicking around all the directories on the hard drive. Very annoying. Then i decided to do hard drive surface scan, and during the scan, windows unmounted the hard drive and re-mounted it. I could see the drive letters disappear in explorer, and then they re-appeared and the autoplay popups appeared again. Not good!I disconnected all the cables and reconnected them, and i encountered the same problems as before - occasional freezing in windows explorer and then the drives unmounting and re-mounting. You don't want the drive to be unmounting during a file transfer - that will cause data corruption.I thought maybe it was a problem with that particular hard drive, so i got another one of my old ide drives and connected that one. Same problem - occasional freezing in explorer and eventually the drive unmounted and remounted itself. I thought the startech usb adapter was defective at that point, so i had outletpc send me a replacement.I connected my old ide hard drive to the replacement adapter, and same thing - freezes in explorer and eventually the drive unmounted and remounted itself. This adapter is a poor product. I will have to try out one of the other brands that i researched - either sabrent or cable unlimited.