Unitek: SmartLink Trinity USB 3.0 to SATA II & IDE HDD & SDD Adapter

Many of us might be familiar with this scenario: A client brings in a hard drive of old DAW sessions to remix. You plug the hard drive in (likely needing some weird cable and adapter), and nothing appears on the computer's desktop. Many HD issues like this are simply due to the electronics in the HD enclosure failing, yet the internal drives are often still in working condition. I don't know why I didn't think of this before, but I had this exact scenario with a client recently, and I quickly scanned Amazon and ordered an adapter. My first adapter was only for SATA-based drives, but another client showed up with an even older external unit that had IDE drives inside (different pinouts and 4-pin power cables), so I ordered the SmartLink Trinity, which handles SATA and both 40-pin and 44-pin IDE drives. It'll read/write to 3.5" and 2.5" drives of both types, has an external wall wart power supply, an on/off switch, and you can hook up three different drives and access them simultaneously. There are a variety of adapters that can read "raw" drives, and some feature card readers and other functions. Picking up these adapters led me to buy a stack of $55 2 TB SATA drives to back up my studio and mix sessions (making two copies of each), saving me hundreds of dollars in hard drive enclosures, and taking up less space on my archive rack. Perfect!