Dock Your Hard Drive

If you're like most computer-based gearheads, it's more than a little likely that you have an extra hard drive or two just laying around taking up space and collecting dust. You might even be contemplating building a low-end homemade rig just to serve as a new home for those still functioning but probably smaller-capacitied (not really a word) drives. Or, perhaps you recently upgraded from a tower PC to a laptop and have yet to transfer all that data off of your old machine. Which ever is your issue, computer accessory company, , has the perfect device to add to your computer setup: it's .
Think of the dock you stick your iPod in to charge its battery or transfer media. Essentially, the Brando HDD dock is exactly like that, only bigger, for obvious reasons. It can take your full-size 3.5 inch internal hard drive or even your laptop-size 2.5 inch drive and connect it to any computer with a USB port on it. Pick up one of these and you've just put all of your old SATA drives back to work.
This hard drive dock comes in two flavors. One is just . The other does the same and manages to squeeze in to make up for the one it's using up in your computer. Not a bad trade-off.
The non-USB-ported drive dock will run you $45US and the 4-port-USB-hubbed version will run you $9 more--but watch out. Brando is a Hong Kong-based company and, as a result, shipping can be on the costly side for such a fairly small-sized device. To get either drive dock to your home in the US, you'll need to drop $24 or $28, respectively. Apparently, those 4 ports cost a dollar per port extra to ship. Be glad they didn't shove in a Firewire port just for spite!
Sadly, there is no mention on either of the drive dock's product pages regarding IDE drive support.