Agreed. As a tech support specialist for an environment of around 2,000 PCs and laptops, this tool is the most valuable thing I have at my disposal. The one I have handles IDE (not much need for this anymore) and SATA. It has saved my bacon many times over the years and has more than paid for itself.
In a talk at the Derbycon hacker conference in Louisville, Kentucky last week, researchers Adam Caudill and Brandon Wilson showed that they’ve reverse engineered the same USB firmware as Nohl’s SR Labs, reproducing some of Nohl’s BadUSB tricks. And unlike Nohl, the hacker pair has also published the code for those attacks on Github, raising the stakes for USB makers to either fix the problem or leave hundreds of millions of users vulnerable.
Personally, I always thought it was insane that USB drives don't come with physical write-protect switches to keep them from being infected by malware.
The machine itself was not the problem-- it was the seller that led to its downfall.
Fresh out of high school in 1978, I was hired by a local RS specifically to become an expert sales rep for the TRS-80, due primarily to my modest knowledge of computers and programming. But about the time I had to embarassingly ask for a customer's name and address for a 69-cent battery purchase for the umpteenth time, I realized it was a lost cause. Never sold a single computer. And I eventually quit pestering customers for their info and started filling in names and addresses selected randomly from the phone book after the customers left the store. Even that was not enough to contain my disgust and I quit. The upside was my experience with RS led directly to going to college. Never did retail again.
A conclusion is simply the place where someone got tired of thinking.
