Keeping a lot of data on multiple hard drives is a great idea, but it can also be an inconvenient and costly method of backup if you don’t plan ahead. You can buy expensive enclosures or physically open the PC case and plug in the drives, but we have been using different solutions that make it very easy to move data around. And the best part is, these solutions are practicle and cheap. So if you have extra SATA or IDE hard drives lying around and want to use them as extra backup storage, these two devices are what you’ve been looking for.

Sata HDD USB Docking Stationby Thermaltake
If you have a 2.5 or 3.5 inch SATA drive, then this external dock system is a great way to interface with it. Simply insert the bare hard drive into the 2.5 or 3.5 slot and plug the USB cable into your computer and you suddenly have an external hard drive for extra storage. You really see benefit from this type of device if you have multiple hard drives and want an easy way to backup and move data from location to location. It looks nice and is really a great solution for connecting drives to computers.

Deckcell USB 2.0 to SATA + IDE (2.5″, 3.5″, 5.25″) Cable with Power Adapter
There’s nothing fancy about this, folks, but it really is everything you need to interface those old drives with your computer. Now it’s not meant to sit on you desk for more than a few minutes because the hard hard drive is exposed to the world. So just plug the IDE or SATA adapter into the hard drive, then plug it into the power adapter and lastly attach it to your PC via USB and you suddenly have an external drive connection without the bulky and complicated external hard drive enclosure. The best part is, this setup is less than twenty dollars.