| | Articles | | Scythe Kama Connect 2 Adapter Review | Published on November 13th, 2007
Introduction
As much as we love computer hardware and software it
always tends to eventually have problems. As Murphy's law
says: “Whatever can go wrong, will go wrong”, we
try hard to make sure nothing goes wrong, but as someone
who's been in the industry since the early 90s, there is no
specific formula to follow to prevent accidents. So now that we have
accepted the fact that accidents can and will happen; we must learn to
deal with them by combining skills we gather over time with the best
tools available to us. Now that everyone uses computers and they are
not just a “geek thing”, it creates a lot of demand
for technicians and “skilled friends”. Today, we
have an interesting product in our lab that can help computer fans and
technicians alike during their moment of crisis. Today we are testing
the Scythe Kama Connect 2 Adapter.
Scythe is a Japanese-based manufacturer and distributor; they started
in Japan yet in no time, they started advancing into Europe and the
United States. They are most commonly known for cooling products like
CPU coolers, HDD coolers, RAM coolers, fans and other accessories. They
have facilities in Japan, Taiwan, China as well as offices in United
States and Germany. Scythe began to operate in November 2002, the
company is now five years old (Happy birthday). They are
still considered new to the market but that will no doubt change
considerably during the next five years.
So what exactly is this product? The Kama Connect 2 is an IDE and SATA
to USB adapter - It is not a USB enclosure. The entire idea is to allow
users to connect their IDE or SATA devices (Desktop HDDs, Laptop HDDs,
CD-ROMs, DVD-ROMs, etc) to the computer externally via the USB
port, virtually eliminating the need of opening the case. These of you
who had the chance to work as technicians can only imagine how useful
this kind of product can be especially with Norton Ghost around. This
product is not just to avoid opening dusty cases you can also use it
with devices such as Laptops, HTPCs, Servers and anything that has USB
ports and a suitable operation system. It can be used for
backups, transferring data and I can think of many more possibilities
using this product.
The Kama Connect 2 uses the USB 1.1/2.0 interface and offers support
for all IDE and SATA devices. It only supports SATA1 data transfer
speed, so if you are using SATA II devices, the device will operate at
SATA1 speed (No actual meanings since USB bandwidth is limited and
cannot reach to SATA1/2 bandwidth anyway). You can use the Kama Connect
2 simultaneously with two devices (SATA and IDE). The device has two
IDE ports (2.5” and 3.5”) yet using two IDE devices
simultaneously is unsupported. No driver is required, you just plug it
in and it uses the default USB drivers included in all the latest
operation systems. This is the second version of the product,
the first one (Kama Connect 1) had no 2.5” HDD support and
less accessories. Check out the next page where we carefully
examining the entire product.
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