My Seagate External Hard Drive Broke

I bought this Seagate 1TB External Hard Drive about 8 months ago and it's been great, no problems with it at all. Then today I tried to plug the USB cable into the connector on the hard drive casing and the connector snapped, falling inside the hard drive casing..So, after opening the case I see that the connector has completely broken off the motherboard circuit inside.

I managed to press the broken connector down really hard onto the board in the spot where it was originally attached, and lone behold, it worked. So the 1000GB hard drive still works perfectly. After about 5 minutes of holding this piece on the board my thumb was aching!

At least the hard drives still good!

So now I have a few choices, I can either buy a soldering kit and solder the connector back on to the board, buy a new SATA hard drive enclosure, or just buy an IDE, SATA to USB converter kit. I think I'll go with the converter kit as it can be used many times and costs about the same as a soldering kit. Also, with the SATA to USB converter kit it can be used for all other hard drives of all types and sizes, like IDE drives, Laptop drives etc, so it seems like a really good buy. Then again, I might take the risk and buy another external hard drive, but not a Seagate! Toshiba 1 TB USB 3.0 External Hard Drive seems to be a good choice. The reviews make me think this external drive might last longer then a few months. Price isn't too bad as well.

Comfast Wireless USB WiFi Adapter

After my last Wifi adapter started to play up I thought I’d better go and buy another one before it stops working completely. My last one was a full sized USB adapter that is very easy to knock on accident due to it just hanging out the back of my laptop. So this time I thought I’d get one of those tiny USB adapters because they are much smaller and less likely to get knocked.

So I had a look on Amazon and ended up buying a tiny USB Wifi Adapter. Some people call them a Nano adapter. In fact, I think that may be the correct term. The exact model I bought is a Comfast 802.11b/g/n 150Mbps Mini Nano USB Adapter.

Once it arrived I thought Great. No more using a book to hold my old faulty Wifi adapter in place so it stays connected to the Internet. Straight away I had problems. The mini driver disc that came with the adapter did not work in my CD ROM drive. The CD ROM drive wouldn’t even detect that there was a disc in the drive.

So I took the disc up to my desktop computer. My Asus CDRW wouldn’t even detect the disc, and that drive usually picks up any disk. It was only when I put this miniature disc in my DVD ROM that it just about worked. First it worked and then it would vanish, so I would end up being asked to “Enter a disc into Drive D”, when the disk was already in there. Very annoying.

Finally, the disc stayed readable for long enough for me to copy and paste all the files to my computer. From there I installed the Comfast Driver for XP and it worked very well. Surfing the Internet is fast and I have no complaints as far as the speed of the adapter is concerned. However, it was quite annoying to have been supplied with an obviously faulty disk. And to mess about copying drivers onto flash drives in order to install the required drivers on my laptop.

Also, I thought that this adapter would be totally concealed except for the tiny square block that houses the circuit board but it isn’t fully concealed. Check out the picture below to see how much is still exposed. That is with the adapter pushed in as far as it will go. I guess the manufacturers made it like that so the user has something to grab onto when taking it out of the USB slot

I don’t mean to just point out all the bad points of this adapter, it does work well once installed. These are just a few niggles that I thought would point out so a potential buyer of this product knows what to expect. A good alternative product is the Edimax EW-7811Un 150 Mbps Wireless 11n Nano Size USB Adapter.