This might be useful for people who are thinking of buying external hard disk enclosures.

Introduction
I think most of you guys would have known about my switch in PC after my old one CPU fan died. So there was this problem, my new PC takes in SATA but my old disks were IDE disks, and there are no IDE/ATA slots in my new PC. So what to do buy a casing right!

Contents of the R-Driver III with the lousy PSU and the great adapter

R-Driver III
That's when my troubles started, I got this R-Driver III at Challenger for $28(after seeing some people at my office use it), it has SATA,3.5" and 2.5" connections. Thought it would be good since there were no casing, just plug in a few cables and ur set to transfer your files off your old hard disk Wrong ! I fiddled with it for a few days, reading forums on why such things don't work and so on.

I tried running on different OS, (Vista, XP, Linux), didn't work. Making sure it's the only external HD present (Linux detected it for a short while but while reading the disk it hanged). Plugging the thing in different ports, didn't work.

I finally found out that some problems with these devices is that sometimes their power supply unit don't pump out enough juice to get the hard disk running properly.

Vantec Nexstart 3
So yesterday after work, I went to the techies paradise in Sim Lim to take a look at proper external hard disk enclosures. After shopping around, the cheapest I found was at this shop called Best Buys on the 5th floor (it's quite neat the escalator, can't miss it) compared to the other shops the enclosures are cheaper by quite abit. I got a Vantec Nexstar 3 because it's the cheapest, and looks the best out of all the made in china boxes.
The Vantec Nexstar 3

I bought a nice blue box, I put in my hard disk and viola! It works ! Vista was able to detect the hard disk and i spend much of my night transfering files from my old disks.

So if you ever see the R-Driver III in Challenger and are looking forward to using it don't get it. Although the adapter design is good, but the power supply leaves much to be desired.

Conclusion
The R-Driver III is a compact little kit that would be useful if you just want to transfer data from harddisk quickly however the 3.5" capability I tested didn't work on all 3 hard disks I have from my previous PC. However the 2.5" inch adpater works probably due to the fact that 2.5" don't really need the power supply unit. I didn't test the SATA portion of it.

List of Harddisks from my previous PC that I used to test:
  1. Maxtor 20GB from the year 2000
  2. Seagate Barracuda 80GB 7200rpm 2004
  3. Seagate Barracuda 160GB 7200rpm 2006