When your hard drive dies, there always comes the question of how best to move its data onto your new computer and what to do with the old hard drive.
The best answer used to be a hard-drive enclosure, which cost about US$30 on a good day. You had to take your old drive out of the housing and put it in a new aluminum skin to be connected to your new computer via USB cable.
Those of us with multiple drives, or computer hobbyists, soon find our desks littered with hard drives after various crashes and upgrades. I had Frankensteined my own rig together to read various hard drives and was only occasionally electrically shocked when I plugged in and touched the wrong wire.
So I was pleased to discover the Thermaltake BlacX 5G USB 3.0 Hard Drive Dock (yes, it needs a new name).
I could put this nice black box on my desk and leave it plugged in all the time.
This box, which retails for about $55, offers USB 3.0 speeds, the fastest on the market and a good choice to be prepared for the future. You unbox it, plug it in to the wall and plug it in to your PC. That’s it. (It works flawlessly with normal USB slots, so it is completely backward compatible.)
When you have to access a SATA hard drive, you slide it in to either one of the two slots (one for laptop size, one for desktop size) and in a few seconds the drive will show up as an external drive.
The drives can get pretty hot, especially 7,200 RPM drives, so be careful if you leave them plugged in for some time and then go to yank them out. Two rubber sleeves cover the hard drives’ top halves, so you can safely pull them out without getting burned.
This easy access to two SATA slots is amazingly handy to a computer hobbyist; the dock can replace an external drive, if need be. It is also the perfect device for cloning a new hard drive with software like Acronis True Image or Symantec Ghost.
Competing products on the market include some very cheap lookalikes from China, and I’ve found them to be unsatisfactory in the long run. It’s best to spend a little more for the Thermaltake BlacX, which is built like a brick and will last over the long haul.
You can get product details at www.thermaltakeusa.com and often very good deals on eBay, especially on the now-discontinued, slower USB 2.0 version.
James Derk is owner of CyberDads, a computer repair firm and a tech columnist for Scripps Howard News Service. His email address is jim@cyberdads.com