Never knew these things existed, its an adapter that lets you hook up a hard drive right to a USB port, and it shows up as a mass storage drive, and you can transfer files as you please.

This thing has been a godsend to me, I recently had multiple HD failures.
My old drive of 3 years wouldn't boot, so I got a new 1tb drive and hoped that I could at least get files off the old one. I hooked it up as a secondary drive in my computer, and it worked.
I spent about an hour transferring needed files to my new drive.

So I thought I was all set, I was gonna make an image of my new drive, but before I could do that I got hit by that killer virus, and I had to wipe the new drive clean and start all over.
2 things that really sucked was I was just about done doing my taxes with turbotax, it would take hours to enter all of that info again.
Another is my graphics app photoimpact 10, I got loads of custom designs stored in there ,,, And all of this was still on my old drive, but I dreaded hooking it up again.

I'm sure for some of you swapping out drives is no problem, for me it is a huge problem.
My computer is wedged between a computer desk and another desk, 1,001 wires dangling from everywhere.
It weighs half a ton, so to disconnect all the wires, pull it out, lift it up, open it up, take out the secondary drives, screw in the guides for the old drive, put it in, close it up, wedge it back in, hook up the wires again, hope it works ... Then transfer the files, then do it all again to put the other drive back in when I'm finished - I was not looking forward to it, to say the least.

I thought damn, someone must have made something where you can just hook up a drive via USB, and I googled something like "USB hard drive hookup", and good old Newegg was one of the first links.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16812232002

Sounded like just what I needed, so I ordered it and couldn't be any happier with it.
Drive plugged right up, and I got my files in seconds, would have took an hour of sweating and cussing doing it the old fashioned way.

I dug through a storage desk, thinking I might have some old drives in there.
Sure enough, I found this monster from 1998, a Quantum Bigfoot - Look how huge this thing is compared to a modern drive.



A whopping 6.4 gb, which was a humongous capacity in those days.
Anyways, this thing hooks up to SATA or IDE drives, so I'm going to rummage through some of my old drives just for kicks, now that I can do it so easily.

For $20 shipped its a no-brainer, get one.

 

Very good find. But as a bonus (this is what I have usually done) is I go and buy and external drive take it apart and you now have a new drive and a swappable bay. Or you could go to radioshack and pick up a case for about 30 bucks either sata or eide. But thats a good find man. Sorry you got hit by a killer virus. What was its name?? I don't want to get hit so I would like to know whats up with it. hmmmmm sounds like its time to search. Don't mind me. i should have looked at the main page. lol

 

Yup, I detailed my virus saga here too.

I got 2 1tb drives and a 500gb external, so I'm all set on storage.
Then again, one of the 1tb drives is going to be used to back up the other, so I really only have 1.
I may use this to install another OS on one of my spares, I can use that for downloading stuff, and it can be checked for bugs before being installed on the main drive.

 

wouldn't a usb hardrive enclosure do the same thing?

 

Yup, it would.

I have four external USB enclosures and an eSATA/USB "dock". One PATA 3.5" enclosure, one PATA 2.5" enclosure, one SATA 3.5" enclosure, and one SATA 2.5" enclosure. Pretty much takes care of almost any HDD I run across.

The dock I have for 2.5" or 3.5" SATA drives is better than the enclosures, but gets finicky sometimes if you try to go over 1TB in drive size.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...-112-_-Product

 

I don't know what a usb hard drive enclosure is, all I know is this little gadget saved me from having to tear into my computer to retrieve data off an old drive.

 

USB Hard Drive Enclosure is a empty shell with a small circuit board inside that allows you to plug an internal HDD into. You assemble the empty shell case around the internal HDD, and bingo, you have an external USB hard drive.