This has been a pretty popular category of product lately, and the description on that ThinkGeek page is pretty much why. Right this moment, I have five spare SATA drives and another five PATA drives sitting around my desk, and another two SATA drives in a dual-enclosure. When I scrape the cash together I'll put four of the SATAs into a Drobo, but I'll still end up replacing them every once and a while. These spare drives are perfect for backups in particular. They're old, but only have to run a fraction of the time of an in-use drive. I always make two backups, so there's virtually no chance of data loss (*knocking on wood*).

All that said, I do not have one of these, but I can't imagine they're much different than your standard USB-to-SATA adapter, except with a better enclosure to keep the drive stable. I use one of those for my backups and haven't had any problems, so I don't see why this would be any different, if not better. I also imagine that these docks would be easier on SATA drive connectors than the pins of a PATA drive.

The first one of these docks I've seen (and also much prettier than the ThinkGeek product - though more expensive) is this one. I've been wanting one of those for a while now. Since then, there's been several of these docks released, the most recent (and craziest) of which is this one that outputs video.