Icy Box gives you a hard drive lifeline

The unit we looked at here will take a standard IDE 3.5-inch hard drive and let you access it through a USB 2.0 port.

The item we looked at also has the famous Colwell Blue Crystal effect - the sides of the box give off a mysterious astral light which looks pretty at night. And the world+dog knows that adding Blue Crystal effects to items makes for an alluring combo. Heck, we've even got a USB cable with blue LEDs plugged in and going nowhere but just to guide us to our PC when we've had one too many - a rare happening, we hasten to add.

As well as letting you get at the files on old HDDs you've got hanging about, you might also have crammed the hard drive bays in your PC chock a block, and need an extra bit of space.

The unit doesn't need a fan, and supports IDE ATA100/133. It comes with a power cable, a USB cable and transformer. As well as the mysterious blue effect which comes on when your drive is connected, the unit also has red and green access and power LEDs.

You open the unit with four thumbscrews and inside there's a tiny circuit board with IDE and power plugs to make the HDD whirr.

It's a piece of cake to connect and secure the hard drive in the unit, power it up, and go.

The drive is cushioned by the sides of the unit, shown below. That means when you've further secured it with a couple of small screws, you're in business.

Obviously there are some compromises with using the USB 2.0 interface to access a hard drive. But in certain circumstances this type of external unit could be a real data saver. µ