As I've mentioned before, I love my external hard drive enclosure. Sure, I thought about buying an external hard drive instead, but the hard drive enclosure (HDE) is more flexible and on top of that, it's cheaper. So what's not to like?
The HDE is a simple box that connects to your computer via a USB port. You can install a hard drive you've removed from a previous computer, or you can purchase extra ones to use in the HDE. Just hook the hard drive into the enclosure, and your computer will see it as an additional drive. If you have other hard drives that you want to access, just swap it out. It only takes a minute or two to remove one drive and install another.
The big advantage of an HDE over an external hard drive is that you can access an endless number of hard drives rather than just one. You might choose to use one hard drive for a monthly backup that you store off-site, and one for a on-site daily backup, for example. When I was moving to a new computer, I purchased another drive from Ebay and stored an image of my old computer on one drive, and selected data files on the other. What can I say, I was paranoid about losing data! It was easy to move the files from one computer to another. I just unplugged the HDE from my old computer and plugged it into the new one. All that was left was to copy the files.
Before sending my oldest computer to the hazardous waste disposal center, I removed the hard drive, and stashed it away. If for some reason I ever need some tidbit of information from the drive, I can pop it into the HDE.
If you want more information on hard drive enclosures, see the recent Lifehacker article, AlphaGeek: Turn an old hard drive into an external drive.
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