An essential hard disk accessory

Bottomline: More expensive than a hard disk enclosure, but it can cope with two disks at once

Manufacturer: Maplin

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If a notebook or desktop PC fails completely, data can often be recovered from the hard disk.

After removing it from the broken computer, it can be plugged into a device such as the Maplin USB 2 Combo Adapter and then plugged into a USB port on any computer, where it will appear in Windows Explorer.

It's true that external hard disk enclosures do the same thing and can be bought for half the price.

The disk is put into the enclosure and connects, again, over USB, but these normally only one of the two types of hard disk.

This combo adapter, however, supports both, as well as both physical sizes of hard disk, making it much more versatile.

What's more, it even accepts two disks at once, one of each type. We tested it with a Blu-ray optical drive and notebook hard disk at the same time and its performance was excellent.

It does leave the disk and data and power wires exposed in an ungainly manner. You also have to contend with its external mains power supply.

The 20cm USB cable supplied is too short for most scenarios, so an extension cable is required, but other than that it's very impressive.