I’ve been shuttling back and forth with drives recently as I’m installing and reinstalling OS’s over the last couple of months. Upgrading is always a pain in the ass and one of the biggest pain points – at least with laptops – is that most of ‘em only support a single drive in the system. So in order to upgrade an OS the procedure usually is:

Attempt to make a complete backup

Remove the drive, plug in the new one

Install the new OS

Load up the data from the backup

Realize that I fucked up and didn’t backup everything

Plug the old drive back in, grab some more files

Repeat at will… <g>

Installing a new OS is enough of a hassle without having to worry about a complete backup. It sounds simple, but even if you remember EVERYTHING there always tends to be one or two files that are locked on the source system that didn’t back or is otherwise not showing up correctly.

Anyway, nowadays there are better ways to deal with this with cable solutions that allow you to externally plug your hard drive into an USB port. I just got one of these from here:

http://cooldrives.stores.yahoo.net/saandidehadr1.html

and it works great. The CoolDrives interface comes with both SATA and standard IDE interface and options for powered access or powered directly through USB.

I didn’t have much luck getting it work without external power – apparently my USB hub in the laptop doesn’t have enough juice to power the drive fully. Although it spun up, Vista wasn’t able to see the drive. Once I plugged it into the power supply and used the ‘powered USB’ adapter the drive popped right up. What’s even nicer is that with SATA drives you can actually hot connect the drive, so this is an easy way to hook up a new drive. Heck, it’s cheaper to buy a bare drive than an external USB with enclosure…

I got this a few weeks back when I needed some more data of my old drive, but this thing has come in damn handy a few times already when a hard drive of a friend of mine machines bombed out. Just being able to quickly plug the drive and hook it up to my system I was able to fix the drive and get it back running from a non-booting system.

I wish I would have looked into this a lot sooner. It sure would have saved me a ton of time for the many updates I went through last year

Well worth the $30 something bucks. Less if you only go the SATA or IDE route…