I have a few external USB drives and needed a new one and was looking either to upgrade the capacity of one of the drives or buy a new unit. I wanted at least a 500GB drive whose sole purpose would be a Time Machine backup drive hanging off my Mac. I have an existing 500GB unit, at the time the cheapest I could find, but it recently died (you get what you pay for!). So, temporarily, I started using an older 250GB drive. But that was filling up; considering I need 200+ MB for backup and Time Machine was starting to delete the older weekly backups.
Was considering one of the Drobo units, to take advantage of increasingly cheaper HDD, but didn’t really need the ultimate flexibility, and didn’t want the price either. To not make that decision, I was going to settle for a cheap enclosure/ATA drive. But, while doing my normal surf habit, I saw a reference to Thermaltake BlacX Docking Station and did some research on it. Basically a toaster like unit to swap SATA drives, both 3.5 and 2.5 units. Everything looked good and I started shopping. Found it on Newegg for $37 and picked out a nice (well-reviewed) 750GB SATA drive for $59. Great solution for < $100!
Now, I’ll continue to look for SATA deals and I’m all set to roll over to a new Time Machine backup, or swap in a drive temporarily to copy to/from archives, etc..
Up and running in no time. Flawless.
BTW… Time Machine is a great app… I know, I know, it is just a backup and lots of other solutions out there, but the fact that it comes as part of Max OS X, and extremely simple to plug in a drive and go is tremendous.. Already saved my bacon after my main drive failed. After the drive was replaced, I was up and running after a simple restore from Time Machine — didn’t lose a thing. Actually, in this case, the drive was not completely shot — it wouldn’t boot but I was able to inspect via DiskWarrior (another great tool) and actually made emergency backup from there before I took in for repairs, but ultimately used the restore from Time Machine