Accessories
I was asked to take a look at what we could buy with the remaining funds. Therefore, I decided to buy several accessories to handle different types of media that is expected to arrive at our lab.
First, standard cables such as IDE cables, power cables, SATA cables, USB A to B, USB A to mini-B, and CAT5e cable. Since these are usually inexpensive, I both a pair of each just in case.
Next, we bought some adapters. A USB-to-SATA/IDE 2.5/IDE 3.5 adapter lets us connect SATA drives, laptop drives, and IDE drives to standard USB ports. A SATA-to-IDE cable lets us connect SATA drives to our IDE write blockers. This is a cheaper alternative than buying a separate SATA write blocker and IDE write blocker.
Other accessories we bought were extra hard drives and external hard drive enclosures. With this, we can easily add disk space to our forensic machines and move them to other machines. We also bought USB flash drives for quick file transfers among the machines.
At this point, we can handle floppies, CDs/DVDs, IDE hard drives, SATA hard drives, and USB devices. These are the more common types of media we receive. However, there will be times when we will receive other types of media such as SCSI drives, tape drives, and other media that we may not have a solution for. At this point, we have several options. We can buy equipment to handle these types of media or we can outsource this to a company that specializes in data conversion. Of course, if required, it must be forensically sound. Our decision would depend on our budget and experience of the technicians.
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