Don’t Toss That Old Hard Drive

Internal hard drives—both for desktops and laptops—have dropped so dramatically in price in recent years that many consumers regularly replace their drives with beefier models to accommodate their everexpanding collections of video files, music, and other storage- hungry content.

But that practice can present a challenge: Do you try to sell the old drive for pennies
on the dollar or simply discard it? Now, you don’t have to do either. Thermaltake has devised a unique solution to using internal hard drives that are no longer installed in your computers. The BlacX SE USB hard drive dock ($69.99; www.thermaltakeusa.com) lets you plug in any 2.5- or 3.5-inch SATA (Serial Advanced Technology Attachment) hard drive up to 1.5TB (terabytes).

The BlacX accommodates hotswapping, which means you can simply plug in a hard drive to the dock while the dock is connected to your running PC. Although this convenience could prove handy for backups and for accessing files on older drives (though, not too old—the dock supports only SATA drives, after all), the design does expose part of the hard drive, in turn potentially allowing for EMI (electromagnetic
interference) issues. Further, drives inserted in the dock are limited to USB 2.0 speeds, but this dock is intended as a supplement to existing internal hard drives.

Source of Information : Smart Computing / January 2009