 For years we have all been used to energy saving monitors and power sources and in recent years acronym RoHS (the EU Directive on the restriction of the use of certain hazardous substances in electrical and electronic equipment) has been popping up on manuals and stickers. But otherwise all computer stuff has been traditionally made out of plastic and metals. Then these gadgets are scratch protected with plastic films, packaged in brown cardboard boxes, repackaged in retail boxes and finally packaged into additional cardboard boxes for shipping – and if you choose to use some courier service that shipping box might still be once again packaged into the courier company's own plastic bag! Picture 1 (on the right): BytePac Kit opened and ready to use.
Especially in this light, receiving the BytePac Kit from post was really really positive surprise. There is practically no shipping waste! The product's own cardboard box acts as a shipping box and only the tear-away-stripe and the front part of the box is discarded. All the rest of the packaging is used as a part of the actual product. Ok, we must note, that if the parcel really gets rough handling during the shipping we might end up with some cosmetic issues with the product, but even in this case the smudges and scratches will most likely be hidden behind the product when it's placed in a bookshelf.
So, what does BytePac Kit include?One BytePac Kit includes three HDD casings and a bookshelf box for them - all made of cardboard. One of these HDD casings include all necessary cables and a power source (connection kit). Additionally the package also includes stickers for the HDD boxes as well as to the HDDs themselves. There are versions available for both computers with USB 2.0 and USB 3.0 bus.
What's it for?With BytePac Kit one can conveniently store up to three serial ata (SATA) hard disk drives (HDDs) and connect them (one at a time) to a desktop or a laptop computer or for any device needing external USB mass storage device.How to use it?Using the BytePac Kit to connect your hard disk drives to a computer is a breeze! All you have to do is to follow the very easy provided connection illustration. See picture 8 below.
Recommendations and notesIf you are looking for a solution to connect standard hard disk drives through usb BytePac is a really good option. I do recommend it especially as it offers unique green approach as well as a visually very agreeable way to store the ugly HD disks in plain sight.
On the practical side, when you are deciding about how many BytePac Kits you need, I would recommend you to reserve one of the BytePac Kit's HDD boxes for the storing of the cables and connection boxes. So the first BytePac Kit offers you boxes for two HDDs (as the third box is needed for the cables). This is of course only needed when the HDDs are only used every now and then, for example for backup copies. If you are planning to use the HDDs on daily basis and (especially) using a desktop computer, where the connection cables can be connected all the time, there surely is no need to reserve any HDD boxes for the cables. Additional BytePac 3-packs (the HDD boxes) without the connection kits are available, so one can have practically unlimited amount of hard drives. Before placing your order, make sure to check the type of your existing hard disk drives! You can use 3,5” or 2,5” serial ata (SATA) disks with the cables that are included in the BytePac Kit, but you will need to order an additional IDE-to-SATA adapter in order to use older 3,5” IDE drives. Unlike with some other vendors' adapters BytePac's IDE-to-SATA adapters are screwed to the hard disks, so you will need a separate adapter for each IDE drive, which can be a bit costly. If you don't know which connector your HDD has, check these: You have IDE drive, if your HDD's data connector looks like the one on this page: Wikipedia You have SATA drive, if your HDD's data connector looks like the one on this page: Wikipedia
Purchasing a BytePac KitThe BytePac Kit can easily be purchased from Convar's web shop ( http://shop.convar.com/en/ ) as well as from Amazon. And there is also a selection of different HDD box sleeve designs available. The Convar's web shop is clear and easy-to-use, but unfortunately there are two major, but normal, Internet shopping problems:
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