yeah but this would be great for techies or just to have around in case, oh i dunno, your 'puter gets incinerated, or dropped into acid or something, so that you can plug the HD into any laptop or any other 'puter and get the data from it.

Very simple, Very nice.

Every IT guy will want one of these. Our IT guy hacked open a USB drive box so he could swap out drives from old PCs that he needs to pull data from. He's going to plotz when he sees this.

I think I just plotzed as well Lorne. I'll be ordering 3 of them.

less expensive than any external storage drive..

I bought that identical adapter from USBGeek a while ago - fairly cheap - $38 including shipping anywhere in the world. Came with all the cables, and has the neat ability to connect with a laptop drive and an regular IDE drive. Heck, the box is identical!

Seagate drives have builtin static shielding.. those would be ideal partners for this. Seashield covers the static-sensitive parts and spreads static charges to the outside so it doesn't get the little chips. And they can withstand G's close to those of a very scary rollercoaster.

If I had owned one of these last week, I could have saved myself a dead PCB while trying to build my own external drive case ... grumble

That's cool. I want one for home and a few for work.

I own one of these. They are great, you can even edit video on an ATA drive you plugged in without opening a PC case.
What they don't tell you is that you can plug in a DVD-ROM drive too.