I picked up a new toy this week. It’s basically an open external hard drive enclosure for your SATA hard drives. Now I have tons of ATA drives lying around, so this is very handy for me but when I saw it I also saw the potential for it’s use as a tech head. With this device you could mount the hard drive from your computer, as long a it’s an SATA drive, and retrieve your files should something go wrong with your system. Now, if your computer is less than 3 years old then chances are you have a SATA drive as your computer’s hard drive. The device connects to your computer via a USB cable, you drop your SATA drive into it and power it on and it mounts the drive on your desktop or in Windows Explorer if you are on a PC. It also has applications as a security device. You can transfer your sensitive files to it and then stick the drive in a safe once you have ejected the drive from the the device. You could also very easily send the hard drive, I’m thinking of the smaller size here that you find in your notebook computers, via UPS or standard mail if you had a project that was larger than 8GB. Think video projects.

It will mount all SATA drives, 2.5 and 3.5 drives and will transfer files at the rate of a standard USB 2.0 connection. (480/mb) I haven’t tried mounting a laptop SATA drive yet, I don’t have a 2.5 drive here at the house at the moment, but I am sure it will work just as well as the three larger drives I have tried. I’m very happy with it and at just over $30 dollars, you can beat the value.

One of the images below you can see that the drive it sitting next to my Mac but I also hooked it up to my Windows box and it worked as advertised there as well.