It happens to the best of us every once in a while. The CEO broke his laptop screen, or the desktop power supply of the VP of HR, who insists on storing data on his C: drive, bit the dust. Now you have a hard drive full of data in a dead system. How do you mount the drive so you can recover the data? Put it in a spare desktop? Is it PATA, SATA, or the mini-PATA connection for laptop drives that also carries power? For around $30 you can stick a USB drive dongle in your bag of tricks and read them all.

A PR agent friend of mine sent me Newer Technology's USB Universal Drive Adapter so I took it for a little spin, reading data from both PATA and SATA drives. Both mounted without drivers under Windows (XP and Vista) and Macintosh OS X. Performance was about half as fast as SATA drives in my desktop, which is good enough for me if I don't have to crawl under a desk or deal with desktop computer dust bunnies. My biggest complaint is that the power LED looks like it should be an on/off button, so I pushed it a little hard into the case and now it's a bit crooked.

Stick one, or a similar dongle from Bytecc, in your bag of tricks. It will come in handy.