This kinda reminds me of those old removable HDDs.
The "wear and tear" on those things wasn't funny.
And the "clickity-klak" way of doing things here doesn't raise my hopes...

Will I have to blow on the hard drives to get them to work?

Real cool now... but not cool in 2015 when you gotta stick your forehead in one of these to get your drivers liscense.

This would be great for computer repair places, because it means that they don't have to put every HD they need to clone into an exclosure (which can be a HUGE PITA). That said, though, it's horribly impractical for the everyday user because it leaves the hard drives exposed to the environments.

But if someone retrofit it into a NES... I just might have to think differently.

if someone can explain why they don't make firewire versions of this I would be really grateful

@discounteggroll: Firewire is not necessary. SATA is intended to be both internal and external, so you get a mobo or SATA card with external SATA connectors. It will thus outperform Firewire.

@kc2idf: But it's not connected via eSATA is it?

2.5" / 3.5" SATA HDD Stage Rack USB v2.0

Considering the cost of HDDs these days, this is a great idea for occasional backups or copying info from HDDs from defunct computers.

@junyo: Judging from the images, USB only only. With SATA and eSATA becomming so popular, methinks this missed it's mark.

@nuttykiwi: If you had an external SATA port on your computer, you wouldn't need this dock to plug in a SATA drive.

Needs a Firewire connection_ USB is unreliable_

For someone like myself who does desktop support - this is awesome... I can just clone/wipe/copy HDD a lot faster.

Not NES. It's more like SNES.

This has many practical uses!! I have a bunch of old hard drives lying around since I can only put so many into my PC. This could expand my storage capacity tremendously! Just need to be sure I know what's on what drive. LOL

Porn, vol.1; Porn, vol.2; Porn, vol.3... =-P

@Simple_thinking:

Exactly..

Now let's get one of these for older IDE drives, and I'll be in business. I tire of enclosures.

BAH!
This would be great, if it had FIREWIRE... can't work on animation and video projects running through USB quickly enough..
guess i'll have to stick to more expensive externals or the standard SATA internals.

@discounteggroll: Because when a company designs a product -- especially the first version of a product -- it is in their best interest to design it such that the largest possible audience can make use of it.

In this case, USB is far more common than Firewire on personal and business computers. Hell, even Apple, the single largest supporter of Firewire, hardly even supports it. iPods have gone from Firewire-only to USB-only, and I'm not even sure that new Macs include Firewire ports as standard.

In short, a Firewire version of this would be a huge gamble, and even if they were to make that gamble, and the potential profit is quite small, thanks to the shrinking number of Firewire users. Not good business, basically.

@Andy S.: I'm sure you have reasons to say Apple barely supports Firewire, but in the meantime, seems like every computer they've sold for years and years has has Firewire 400, and most that I've bought in the past few years have Firewire 800 too. And the ports work fine for me. So now I guess I want to know how Apple barely supports Firewire.

It is brilliant in it's simplicity, though IDE support would make me run out and buy it right now. As for the USB vs Fireware support question it is actually quite simple. For starters USB costs less to implement, is on more computers, and more people understand it and use it. Secondly, this is not meant, in my mind, to act as a permanent external drive that you would use for animation and video work. It is perfect for transferring huge files (such as the results of that animation work), testing hard drives, recovering data from drives that were in dead PCs, and backing up.

@sumocat: smartie-pants.

No doubt they dont' support Firewire, which even at 400 is MUCH faster than USB 2 in practice, because they want to save a buck they'd have to pay to Apple in royalties.

I'd pay $10 more for a Firewir version of this. I will get one anyway, because I do have a lot of small (120-160) gb SATA drives that are too small to waste a Firewire enclosure on, but would be handy for some simple backups.

Great idea!

It can't be good for the hard drive to be sitting in the slot that way, sticking up and resting on its data connection. It's supposed to be mounted by its rubberized gromits. Bump into this thing while it's sitting on your desk and you risk losing your data. Bad design.

I like, I want one . . wish it had firewire and/or esata

Brilliant design, I miss my 8 tracks

Great Idea! I'd buy one *right now* if I could get support for both IDE and SATA. Yeah, I still have a lot of IDE drives I need to pull data from.

I wouldn't want to use this for my daily back ups, but, just to pull data from a drive and transfer it to another, this would be great!

To save it from the environments this thing needs a tinted plastic cover that you can just slip on top so it will look like one of those old-school electric pencil sharpeners.

That said, they should also put in a mod that hooks up to the drive's motor to allow it to do just that.

Mabey this is how the videogames of the future will be... " 320 GB RPG Adventure! over 3 weeks of gameplay!"

While the "faster than USB" comment for firewire is somewhat accurate, the real benefit of firewire is that it does NOT eat up CPU cycles as firewire has its own i/o processor in the firewire chipset.

Firewire is about the only thing Apple does that is truly great. All the other Apple junk is subject to opinion.

My last computer died on me, and it has two perfectly nice hard drives just hanging around and unrecovered.

This will be an awesome way to get it all back.

@Andy S.: Agreed on everything, but all Macs still come with Firewire standard.

THATS THE Balls.

I like it. If only it had an eSATA interface as well...

Wow. Nice product. Yes, needs Firewire, but this is a good start.

Looking at the product pictures, I gotta wonder how solid that construction is. It looks like (cheap) plastic.

Love the idea, I'm sick and tired of using my HD's internal guts switching HD around, I would be even cooler if you can put 5 HD's or maybe 10....Firewire please!

doh..sorry meant to say my external HD's guts....ah you get the picture...

uhh, $40 shipping?

Joking, right? I *almost* just ordered one! (wtf?)

Don't hard drives from different manufacturers have different spacing between the power/data connectors?

They shouldn't on SATA, MIO. Part of the spec is to have the connectors in the spot so they can just slide in.
It's a great idea for techs. I wouldn't recommend it for others as the circuit boards on HD's are static sensitive. Not a good idea to have a lot of handling.
PS. What a stupid video.

As much as I don't think this is very healthy to the HDDs... you know, to be parked in an upright position, to be completely exposed... I still DO WANT one.
This would be so great for my 4 HDD... I completely switched to laptops, and all my HDDs are just laying around.
I mean, yes, I do have cases for them. But this just looks 10x more practical, less cluttering, and stylish.

Where can I buy one???

It's a great concept, but $47+shipping is a steep price to pay when you can get a non-docking version from Frys for less then $20.

@navstar: From the link at the end of the article...

@Bokusatsu_Tenshi: Upright like this puts no more stress on the drive than having it on it's side. In some respects it's better than laying the drive down, because it puts less stress on the platter bearings.

@DickNervous: You can't do this for IDE. SATA standardizes the placement of the data and power ports, specifically so that the drives can be hot-swappable without extra hardware. IDE drives have no standardization, so the cables can be anywhere.
Plus, haven't you noticed how hard it is to attach/detach a molex power plug?

wow your actually saying that this great little unit at $50 is too expensive.

Umkay....maybe to you....but please dont speak for the rest of us.

Ill be ordering one asap!!!! :)

Although I like the cartridge-loading design, a more practical USB solution for temporary use would be one of the many USB-to-SATA/IDE adapters, some that can handle both SATA and IDE and 2.5" and 3.5" drives. They plug directly into the drives and use a separate power brick to power the 3.5" drives.

@zippyZ: They're not saying that $50 is too expensive, they're saying that $50 + $50 shipping is too expensive.

I see they have lots of cool stuff there.
They must actually be in Akihabara with that shipping charge. This is a device that I could really use. They have one with every connection you can think of too, for $171! I will wait for it to come to a estore within a $10-15 shipping range.