Coolgear USB 3.0 to IDE/SATA Adapter with Write-Protect Selection

I do Linux based forensic analysis and this thing has been working great for me. I've only used it with SATA drives so far but the USB3 interface is nice and the write blocker works perfectly. The device shows up in fdisk -l but won't mount properly which is expected behavior. I've run foremost against the raw device and it works perfectly. Sleuthkit and the like work great as well. The only downside is that my co-worker mentioned that EnCase doesn't register that the device is write blocked in it's report. If I figure out a way for this to be registered properly by EnCase then I'll update this review.

Works as advertised. I occasionally need to clone a bad drive to recover data and this is handy to have. Tableau is the way to go for serious write blocking, but this works nicely at a cheaper price for the less critical jobs.

It is a good product at a relatively cheap price. I would suggest to buy it. The only drawback I n i ticed is that I was not able to browsing the write blocked partition, unless specific software was used. Of course some more experimentation is needed to verify what I noticed.

Used this to interface with an IDE laptop hard drive and worked fine. Write block appeared to function as desired. The device came with an external power supply but I didn't need to use it for the 2.5 inch laptop drive when hooked to a USB 3 port. I've had various USB to SATA and IDE interfaces over the years. This was a nice opportunity to consolidate to a single all-in-one device and I like the write block to be sure I'm not messing up the source drives.

This hardware is an absolute disaster. I bought it to clone the 6 TB HGST drives from my RAID array to newer, larger drives. What I found was the biggest mess of non-compliance that I've ever seen. On macOS, the operating system gives up on the drive entirely after double-digit minutes, and the device disappears and reappears suddenly, along with everything else attached to the same USB controller. On Linux (Raspberry Pi 4), performance varies semi-randomly between 80 Mbps and 130 Mbps. When it is at the low end of that range, it is because the device is *spewing* USB bus resets almost continuously, requiring retry after retry. *Sometimes* it gets through an entire copy operation, but it frequently just plain stops just like it does on the Mac. I don't believe for one minute that this device can possibly work reliably under Windows, either. There's just no way that any operating system could plausibly reliably support a device that is this badly behaved. If it does, it's a fluke, and is only because Windows isn't actually using the drive at anywhere near full speed, i.e. with the write software, even on Windows, you should be able to make this USB-SATA bus bridge keel over and die. And at this point, given the sheer number of errors I'm seeing, I can't trust a single byte of what this bus bridge read from the disk. I'm going to have to start over with somebody else's hardware. That's an entire week wasted because of this piece of garbage. This hardware is just plain junk. It's going back.

I am a partner in a computer forensics business and I do a fair number of forensic acquisitions. We own several Tableau write blockers. They Tableaus are pretty much the industry standard. I did buy and test one Wiebe Tech write blocker with a SATA connector and it was very slow compared to the Tableau. I also purchased a Wiebe Tech USB 2.0 write blocker and it did not work on most USB disks. I keep one Tableau at home in case I get a call to to an acquisition at odd hours. This Cool Gear was appealing as a backup device; the price is certainly low. After using it and testing it a while I think it is just OK. It does work as a write blocker, but I seem to get USB 2.0 speeds with it even though it is a USB 3.0 device. It's usable for throwing on my computer and taking a look at a disk that I don't want anything to be written to, but it is too slow to use in most disk acquisitions.

I bought this to read an old IDE drive. It seems to be of good quality, but sadly, I couldn’t get it to work with my IDE drive. I am not sure if it is the device or the drive which is why I didn’t return it and rated it in the middle. Hopefully if I have a need to read a Sata drive it will work. UPDATE: 7/26/2020 I had the opportunity to try it again on a few other IDE drives as well as a SATA Drive. 2 of the 4 IDE connected to it. Since they are old, I am assuming it is the drive's fault, not this device. The SATA Drive also connected. Therefore, I am changing my rating from 3 stars to 5 stars.

I have been in the LE Digital Forensics field for 11 years and have used the best of the best out there. I recently took a side job with a private firm and was building out my own quick response rig. Not wanting to spend $400+ on a Tableau I picked up this thing. Going in I was not super optimistic, but for the price, why not. With some quick bench marking I determined this thing can hold its own and is pulling true USB 3.0 speeds. I'm not talking UASP speeds, but it beat a 5400 RPM USB 3 external drive (albeit with a 7200rpm drive attached). I will be verifying hashes before giving it any case work, but others have tested that and it held up. The only thing I didn't see in any other reviews was speed bench marking, so here it is, screenshot attached. Give it a shot, even if it lasts a year it's worth it.

Very useful bit of kit at a fraction of the price of the competition

Good!!