A house for your homeless 2.5" SATA drive

May 19 2009, 5:00pm

Filed under: Accessories, Hardware, Peripherals, Odds and endsAre you wondering what to do with the 2.5" SATA drive that you yanked out of your MacBook or Mac mini so you could replace it with a SATA Solid State Drive? For $19.99, the OWC Express USB 2.0 bus-powered enclosure provides a new home for that old drive so you can use it as a backup or spare drive.The Express enclosure is just slightly larger than an iPhone at 3.07" x 5.12" x .55" (78mm x 130mm x 14mm), and weighs just 2 ounces (56g) empty. Just toss in your old 2.5" SATA drive and you have a bus-powered USB 2.0 drive that easily fits in your pocket. You can also shop around for new bare SATA drives; a 500GB, 5400 RPM drive can be had for as low as US$97 (I'm sure you can find them for less!), making for a low-cost and portable backup solution.There are other similar USB 2.0 enclosures out there; MacAlly's PHR-250A (US$19) and StarTech SAT2510U2 Infosafe (US$17.96) are about the same size and weight as the Express, while the Vantec NexStar SX NST-285S2-BK (US$22.02) and Sabrent EC-UST25 (US$14.97) are larger and heavier.What's your favorite use for disk drives that you've pulled out of your Macs? Leave a comment below.TUAWA house for your homeless 2.5" SATA drive originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Tue, 19 May 2009 12:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments

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