With a hard drive docking station (like the Thermaltake BlacX) those problems are part of the past, you can now hook up a 2.5″ or 3.5″ hard drive with out having to open your computer case and without turning your computer off!!!

The Thermaltake BlacX docking station offers a slot that is compatible with internal SATA drives that are 2.5″ or 3.5″ it either uses USB 2.0 or eSATA connectivity (eSATA being the fastest).

Thermaltake BlacX -Click to Buy it-

Docking Station Uses:

• To recover files from crashed computers
• Use it for back-ups
• Use it to boot into different operating systems
• Or simply as extra storage

Thermaltake BlacX Specs:

• Supports All 2.5″ and 3.5″ SATA Hard Disk Drives, up to 1.5TB
• Hot-Swap Capability for Rapid Multi HDDs Access and Exchange
• Supports eSATA Transfer Speed up to 3Gbps
• Supports USB 2.0 Transfer Speed up to 480Mbps
• Compact Docking Station Design Maximizes Heat Dissipation & Exhaust

Without any doubts, this option is a lot better than using an external enclosure.

I also found this interesting hard drive docking station from StarTech that has not 1 slot, but 2. Yes, you can have 2 hard drives connected at the same time! It seems to be the ideal solution for disk imaging or data recovery. It’s a bit more expensive than the Thermaltake one but it may be a better buy for some of us.

StarTech eSATA -Click to Buy it-

LaCie External Hard Disk 1TB

I purchased this external hard drive about 4 months ago, and it’s been powered on since then. After extensibly shopping for the “perfect” hard drive, I decided to buy it because of several advantages it has:

• Stylish design
• e-Sata connection (super fast speeds)
• 1TB (Can hold many photos )
• Small foot print
• 7200 RPM
• 16MB Cache
• blue light matches with my case lights.

The only bad thing about it is that the provided e-Sata cable is really short.