SOLD!

You're right, i have a few 80gig'ers lying around now, not worth stuffing in a case but would be handy as music/VM backups.

Such a simple idea, gah!

Nice, but ...

We have just such a stack of drives at work. Trouble is, the majority of them are IDE rather than SATA - I suspect a lot of people will be in a similar situation. I appreciate that there'd be issues with making an IDE version, not least the different connectors used by 2.5" and 3.5" drives, but I think there'd be a market for it.

Even better would be a 'two slot' version for disk duplication - great for backups or rebuilds; just pop two disks in, press the button and leave it to do its thing. A sampled 'ker-chunk' sound at the end of the duplication process is optional :-)

Hmm..

These toaster-shaped things have been around for a while. However, I have some Sharkoon thingy, utterly ghetto fabulous, which just plugs straight into the drive- it groks IDE, 2.5 inch disk IDE, SATA, and can power the disk- and connects to the computer via USB mass storage (so works fine on my linux boxes). It even came with rubber catsuits for 3.5 inch and 2.5 inch disks, to keep them safe on your desk. The whole thing was dead cheap and works like a charm.

It isn't as cool-looking as this thing, but it's awesome for recovering data from disks for people :)

UK prices ...

... for those who are interested: £24 ex.VAT for the USB2 drive adapter and £71 ex.VAT for the Voyager-Q from www.thebookyard.com (NewerTech distributors, so it seems)

Think I'll hold out for the USB/eSATA version of the toaster ...

Re: This assumes

Actually, every SATA (1.5G/3G) I have ever seen uses the same layout for connectors (Maxtor, Hitachi, Western Digital, Seagate). A large number of modern hot-swap caddies depend on this.

Also the fine article specified this is SATA, not IDE.

Waste

What a waste of Money.

You can pick up a powered usb drive adaptor that runs ide and sata drives ! for about £20

There are more flexible (but less "cool") solutions...

Yawn. I've had a "Scythe Kama Connect 2" for ages. This is a USB adapter for SATA and PATA drives (including both 3.5 inch and 2.5 inch ones). It works really well as a "whats in this HDD" device. Details & pics are here:

http://www.quietpc.com/gb-en-gbp/products/harddrivesolutions/kama-connect2

I don't really see the value in the toaster drive dock. I mean it's cool, but if I'm buying drives specifically for it then I'd rather put them in protective caddies (and I'd rather have the drive slot in horizontally to keep dust off the contacts). And if I'm using it with random hard drives then it needs to support PATA too. (And doing a "toaster style" device for PATA is impossible because the drive manufacturers all put the connectors in different places; one of the things they fixed in SATA was they standardised the connector location to make hotswap enclosures like this possible).

Maybe this is just ahead of it's time - in 5 years I won't care about PATA any more.