External USB SATA drive dock?

Does anyone have any experiences with this:

http://www.thinkgeek.com/computing/drives/a7ea/

I've got a couple of spare drives around that I could use to make a quick and dirty back up (secondary to the Time Machine hooked up to the home network) of some files. Any long term damage to be concerned about with this type of setup? Wear and tear on the drive pins? I'm guessing heat wouldn't be an issue.

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.

We've got one at work and it's great when you've got a lot of hard drives coming through. I don't know if it's a great idea to use long term on the same drives over and over again, as it may place stress on the connectors (it doesn't seem to, but it could be happening). I've also heard that sata connectors aren't rated for that many connects/disconnects, but that seems like an unlikely failure mode that I've never heard of actually being a problem in practice.

If you're backing up in a store it and forget it process like picture backups, it's a great convenience. If you're going to cycle through the same three drives, I'd bite the bullet and buy proper enclosures.

Matthew

To each his own, I guess.

Personally, I'm not a big fan of flat grey-brown. Maybe it's auto-body primer.

I'm pretty sure that's black. It's just a bad photo. Check out the pictures further down the page. And even if it was brownish, I'd still prefer it to the much larger, glossy-white ThinkGeek product with the horrible DirecTV HR20-esque bright blue ring:

Holy crap I want a couple of those! What an awesome idea!

There are loads of models of these things if you buy from Hong Kong directly. Shipping is cheap.

Is this the new Dealextreme?

Yep I have one.

It works as advertised.

I got it because I have some spare 200, 300, 320 Gb sata disks hanging around and I can zero them off for security, do a quick backup etc etc.

On my system I get about 30Mb/s on a 2.6.18 kernel but only 512k/sec on a 2.6.25 kernel. Not investigated at all yet.

I also haven't got smart to work yet but again, no investigation/effort.

I do notice that the 'eject' causes the drive to move before it spins down. I've had several RMA replacements recently and you have to wait a few seconds before the gyroscopic effect diminishes <eek>

I got mine off ebay
(oh, and if I open the cupboard I see it's black)

No, I don't think so.
DealExtreme: free shipping
Brando: $3 for all orders

2-in-1 Laser Point and LED
DealExtreme: $4.78 for a 4-pack
Brando: $6 for 1

Photon LED Lights
DealExtreme: $4.73 for 10
Brando: $5 for 1 (they have more colors, though)

These are (the) only two that I checked. I'll pass, thank you.

Stig

FYI - these things probably won't do SMART.

Not a huge deal - but I wanted to use mine to check the status of various disks that are hanging around and it's a bit of a nuisance that you can't do self-tests and the like.

more details:
http://smartmontools.sourceforge.net/faq.html#testinghelp

Which things?

I have one of the white NexStar "toaster" docks here, and everything works when using eSATA to talk to it, including SMART.

Not over USB, though. I have yet to find a USB enclosure/adapter that works with smartctl, though many of the newer ones now *do* support SCSI-ATA-Transport Passthrough for hdparm and the like.

Cheers