Useful gadget that saved my virtual life

[Cobalt Greywalker]

So, Thursday my long serving old man of a desktop died of irrcoverable brain seizure (at least, given the symptoms, it looked as though the CPU went). This forced me to finally upgrade to a new desktop.

This is not that story.

What really caused me problems was that fact that I apparently hadn't been doing my backups as regually as I though I had, with that latest one I found being ~9 months old.
Fortunately the old man had been fairly high spec when I'd got it all those years ago, so I had SATA drives in it.

Which is where http://dynamode.net/english/pages/produ ... HDK-E.html]THIS came in really handy. And the good thing is I can re-use the drives for backup purposes.

So besides the moral of doing regular backups, the other moral of this story is there are all sorts of useful things if you know where to look.
(Yes, there are ones which will do IDE drives as well)

[Black Aeronaut]

Oh yeah, these things are incredibly handy to have around. Short of an actual drive failure they can really save your ass.

[s3yang]

Well, they're nice and everything, but you can get pretty much the same effect if you're willing to open up your computer case. There's no real difference in plugging your HD into one of those adapters as opposed to hooking it up to the sata port on your new motherboard. Except for speed, in which case the sata port is actually much faster. Basically, if you know enough to take a sata drive out of your computer you know enough about how to plug one in. Mind you, I've got one myself, as naked drives are usually much cheaper than the portable drives you can usually buy.

[Wiregeek]

I use one of these as a high-capacity 'thumbdrive', since it is correctly designed, and Just Works on every OS I have yet to try it on. Also handy for recovering appropriate drives.
"No can brain today. Want cheezeburger."
From NGE: Nobody Dies, by Gregg Landsman
http://www.fanfiction.net/s/5579457/1/NGE_Nobody_Dies

[LynnInDenver]

Well, they're nice and everything, but you can get pretty much the same effect if you're willing to open up your computer case. There's no real difference in plugging your HD into one of those adapters as opposed to hooking it up to the sata port on your new motherboard. Except for speed, in which case the sata port is actually much faster. Basically, if you know enough to take a sata drive out of your computer you know enough about how to plug one in. Mind you, I've got one myself, as naked drives are usually much cheaper than the portable drives you can usually buy.

They're mostly useful for the convenience factor of not having to open another machine to access data on a hard drive. Especially if you've got a power supply that has limited connections or remaining power capacity. I can see techs using them for the convenience of not having to leave the diagnostics machine unbuttoned, for instance. Plus, it's something that you can more easily hot swap if you need that hard drive data right now. I'd be leary of hot swapping onto an internal IDE or SATA connector.
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"You know how parents tell you everything's going to fine, but you know they're lying to make you feel better? Everything's going to be fine." - The Doctor