Something to add to your toolkit

Like a lot people out there I am starting to use external USB hard drives for things like backing up my own SBS Server and also on client sites to allow me to transfer or move data.

Most of you are probably aware that you can buy a kit that allows you to take a standard 3.5" ATA ide drive and convert it into an external USB 2.O hard drive.

For example this link shows a typical kit that comes complete with a power supply and a box that you place an ordinary internal IDE drive into
http://www.usb-ware.com/ads-usb-2-hard-drive-kit.htm

Now that's pretty good because it allows you or me to choose the drive and capacity we need and most of these kits are less than 60 Euros / Dollars

However what I think is even neater at least for your toolkit is a simple IDE to USB 2.0 adaptor with a power supply so you can basically hook up any IDE device externally using USB temporarily.

http://www.cwol.com/usb/usb-2-ide-adapter-ud200.htm

What could it be used for, well I have a customer who clones / ghosts his pc's over the network when he has a hard disk failure, wouldn't it be much easier to have a cheap 100 GB drive with 7 or 8 build images on it and hook it up via USB 2.0 whenever he needs to rebuild a production pc instead of relying on a slow network connection.

Comments anyone ?
TTFN Mark