ANDY’S PICK OF THE WEEK ( NewerTech Universal Drive Adapter and Newer Tech Voyager)

I literally have a milk crate full of hard drives...

I got big raw noisy HD exposed to the air ... For a couple of years now I have been using this really cool accessory from Newer Technology... a generic solution that allows you to mount just about any hard drive mechanism you have that uses the serial ATA interface, without having to mount it inside a case or an enclosure or anything like that.

It’s useful for a whole bunch of different reasons … number one, there’s so many times I keep going through computers; I replace a desktop maybe every couple of years; I replace a laptop maybe every year and half or so ... and it’s such a big bother to have to get all of your old data off the old machine and put it on your new machine ... So what do you do with the old one (drive)? Normally you have to buy an enclosure ...

Newer Tech makes a couple of different products that just plug directly into those mechanisms … and it turns a Hard Drive into a Hard Drive ... Even right now, as I speak, I have a 500 GB drive from my old Power Mac G5 on my desktop, mounted, just so I can copy old movies, older music and photos and off of them; and once it is copied onto my brand new storage device, I can either recycle the drive or reuse it as another drive ... it was very, very easy for me to do these copies… the cheapest one is just called the USB 2.0 Universal Drive Adapter … very, very geeky, very, very manly sort of name, also very affordable, its only about $35 bucks.

But recently I got in their next generation product, which I think takes the idea to the next level … they essentially make a tiny desktop toaster for drive mechanisms; it works the same way as that $35 adapter, whether you have a little notebook drive, a big internal hard drive, whatever, you plug it in and it mounts on your desktop instead of being a cable connected to a box, though, it is like a little toaster; you can stand it (the HD) right up and stick it inside this little slot, and bright lights will light up, and you will be able to interface with them .

It’s actually nice enough that I am starting to use that as a normal drive, as a normal storage device. This is also another good articulation of the basic concept of always needing more data, always needing new storage. One of the things that kind of stops me from buying new drives when I really need them is the fact that, well you know, geez, I really don’t want to spend another $200 on another terabyte of storage. With a device like this, you can essentially use HD mechanisms like floppy drives. Again, with those 50 MB image files, you almost have to these days, so you can buy the mechanism at absolute dirt cheap cost, and then stick (a hard drive) in there, and you save about half the cost of buying an external drive and an external enclosure.

The third thing that is really awesome about both of these solutions is that it really makes diagnostics and fixing problems very, very easy. Right now, my MacBook, the MacBook that I replaced with a MacBook Pro recently, it developed an overheating problem, where you can’t leave it running for more than a couple of hours before it will just overheat and shut down, boom, no warning, it’ll just shut right down, which means it is impossible to do a final backup of this drive, because by the time the software gets about halfway through it, you get a shutdown; and that’s even worse, because you don’t want to shut down whilst in the middle of writing data .But since I have this Voyager, since I have these cables, all I have to do is remove the drive from my notebook, plug it in, mount it on my iMac,and now it is just an external drive. Now I can simply back up everything and simply do a drive swap that way.

So, it’s one of those things, that if you work with data or work with lots of different computers, the $35 ugly lookin’ one, is something that you will keep in the desk drawer, and you will find a use for it, in the next 6 months, I guarantee it.

If you run through a whole lot of drives, and you are not really ready to pop for a more serious solution, the Voyager Q, (they make two models, one is $70, one is $100, depending on whether you want to be able to mount a wider variety of drives or not) it’s a really good solution for always expanding your storage, always being able to produce bootable backups that you can then just toss in a desk drawer … or put very carefully in a padded bag.

I like it a lot. Again, I love these solutions where I have it in my office, I don’t think I’m gonna use it, but then, it’s like “Oh, thank God I have this thing, if I did not have this thing, my life would be very different right now.”

You can go to NewerTech.com to can buy them …