NewerTech’s drive dock offers drive-swapping action

Expo: NewerTech’s drive dock offers drive-swapping action | Macworld:

Newer Technology debuted the NewerTech Voyager Q Hard Drive Docking Solution Tuesday at Macworld Expo. The Voyager Q turns any 2.5-inch or 3.5-inch Serial ATA (SATA) hard drive into a fully bootable and hot-swappable external drive and features four interfaces: FireWire 800, FireWire 400, USB 2.0, and eSATA.

For those of you who actually do backups and always wonder why you’re buying more hard drives — here’s a new toy.

It’s a dock for drive mechanisms. I’ve been playing with an interface that does a similar thing, but in a much geekier way. This is plug and play.

Why is it neat? Because it means when you need disk capacity, you don’t have to buy the enclosure, the power supply, the interface — you can just buy the mechanisms. That can save you from $50-$100 per unit, so this can quickly pay for itself. You also end up with a much more compact footprint for storage.

Don’t forget to store the bare drive mechanisms in anti-static bags, but if you’re buying a lot of disks to keep track of your photos or video, this puppy is going to be a useful addition to your tool kit.

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