I recently filled up a 1TB internal hard drive with Time Machine backups. I ordered a 2TB drive to take its place, and put the full, bare drive in a drawer for safekeeping.
A couple of months later, I needed to access some of the data on the old drive, so I pulled out a USB “universal drive adapter” and tried without success to connect it to my Mac Pro. I never figured out the issue, but I also didn’t spend a lot of time on it since the situation wasn’t critical. But it made me think that there had to be a better way to access old hard drives.
Enter the Voyager family of hard drive docks, from Newer Technology. These little units sit on your desk, looking like stubby toasters, and hook up to your computer via a wide array of connectors (including USB 2, FireWire 400/800, and eSATA). They accommodate both 2.5″ and 3.5″ bare SATA hard drives in their “toast” slots, in capacities up to 2TB.
Mine just arrived this afternoon and I quickly unpacked it, and connected it to my Mac via FireWire 800. (The unit comes with all the connector cables, which is pretty cool in and of itself.) I grabbed the aforementioned 3.5″ drive and stuck it in the slot, hit the power switch on the dock, and in less than a minute, the drive appeared on my desktop as a typical FireWire volume, and was accessible just like any external drive.
The unit is plug-and-play (on my Mac, anyway) and the drives are hot-swappable.
This is a great and relatively inexpensive solution for the problem of what to do with full back-up hard drives. Combining a Voyager dock with these stackable anti-static storage cases makes accessing back-up data easier than ever.