If you’ve upgraded the hard drive in your laptop or desktop machine, then you’ve got a naked, homeless hard drive sitting around in one of your drawers. Put that puppy to use by plugging it into ThinkGeek’s External USB SATA Drive Dock and boom, you’ve got extra storage without the enclosure.
A professional photographer buddy of ours (who requires massive amounts of storage) uses the Drive Dock the way we used to use floppy drives: He’s got dozens of hard drives lying around, and he plugs them into the dock as needed.
At $39.99, buying a Drive Dock (and naked hard drives to go into it) is way cheaper than going the conventional enclosure-bound route, and it takes up less space on your desk.
Drive Dock: turn bare drives into “floppies” – Core77
You might wonder why I regurgitated this post of Core 77
Well it instantly hit a button in my mind, because I have a sort of museum here in my office of outdated unused gadgets. Among which these:
My first “Laptop”…..a Sharp that was kept in quarantine in Marseille, because of some anti Japan import regulations en vogue those days (20 years ago) for six months. I was able to negotiate some rebate with the seller…but it cost me the equivalent of Euro 8,000 those days… among a couple of Hard Disk drives that I would love to run in this HD docking station….and some stale nokias.
Also useful when your PC dies but the hard drive remains intact (as I found to my relief in the middle of a large project!).
Yes Stephen. You’re with me.
My experience is that puters die faster than HDD’s. I run a server from a more than 10 yrs old HDD that is now in its 3rd puter.
Instead of screwing or sliding HDD’s out of your dead puter and having to screw it or slide into another puter or one of those Ultra HDD holders – you see one at the left side of the photo – this is a must have for me as I have far more HDD’s than holders.
Since a non geeky Durch prosecuter caused a stir a and lost his job a couple of years ago when he had put his died puter in a garbage bin where it was found by a criminal who had full access to his secret info, I never threw a HDD away.
Such docking station is ideal to empty old HDD’s and scramble them before throwing them away…..