Got my ThinkGeek fix Friday, which included a Vantec NexStar SATA drive dock. I had a spare 320GB SATA drive sitting around and slapped it on my test system running 11.1 beta 4 (was backing up for the 11.1 beta 5 install…) and everything just worked.

I’ve tried various removable drive products over the years, but they always seemed to require some drive case that was a pain to hook up. This, on the other hand, is easy as pie — insert SATA drive, power on, use, unmount, remove, repeat as needed. According to the product specs, it handles up to 1TB drives, though I’m not sure what would limit it to 1TB if you can find a SATA drive with higher capacity.

You have the option of connecting via eSATA or USB — I’m using it over USB, but would like to test out eSATA when/if I upgrade to a machine with an eSATA connection. Very handy, especially if you’re doing anything that makes sense to back up off site. I was moved to buy this after realizing the last real data backup I’d managed was from February. Not good.

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