A nice useful investment.

[JCitron]

I purchased a BlacX made by Thermaltake. I got mine at BestBuy, but I've also seen them online on NewEgg, and I'm sure they are available in other computer-parts outlets.

http://www.thermaltakeusa.com/Product.aspx?S=1268&ID=1642

This is one of the most useful computer add-ons I think that anyone should have that needs to back-up gobs of data. It takes standard, off the the shelf, SATA drives and turns them into portable external drives.

Using the USB interface, the unit plugs into any USB port. The hard drive simply plugs into the BlacX and sits bare in the device. Since it's USB, it's hot swappable, and drives can be changed on the fly. There's an eject button to pop the drive out of the holder, and an on/off switch to kill the power when it's not being used.

I use mine for backups, and recently purchased another 1TB hard drive for to go along with my older 320GB drive, which was used initially. The new drive simply plugged in, I formatted and partitioned the drive using standard Windows Drive Manger tools, and I was good to go. This is unlike many other external drive solutions, which require special interfaces to access them. One the drive is mounted, it appears to the system like any other hard drive.

The throughput isn't bad, being a USB device, but I'm not sure I would run Trainz from it.

A great investment that I thought I'd share.

John

 

[EdrickV]

You know, that's just an external enclosure. (Though it sounds like it may be a good one.)

There are hundreds of those on Newegg, some for IDE drives, some for SATA, and some that can do both. And with a variety of external interfaces, including eSATA, Firewire, and of course USB. (There are even listings for two USB 3.0 enclosures, though they aren't currently available and motherboard support for USB 3.0 is still limited.

Edit: Oh, and some enclosures can use multiple drives.

 

[Johnk]

I've got this one. Does any Sata or IDE drive and a heck of a lot cheaper.

Works perfectly too. I done all kinds of disks with it.

http://www.dealextreme.com/details.dx/sku.21571

 

[johnwhelan]

I picked up one of the Samsung Story USB external drives from newegg, a terabyte of storage, 3 year warrenty on the hard drive, $99 US from newegg.com.

I reformatted the drive to NTFS and just use Windows backup trying to keep the backup file size under 30 gigs.

They also do a 1.5 terabyte and a 2 terabyte version. Power switch on the front so just turn it on when you want to use it.

I hadn't noticed that the $60 device didn't have any storage at first, hard drives were extra.

Cheerio John

 

[Apogee10]

I have a cheap one like Johnk mentioned that I have been using for a year.
When I got a new computer I removed the hard drive from my old computer and, using the caddy, connected the hard drive to my new computer. I run Trainz from the external drive and it works fine. I had to change the shortcuts on my desktop to point to the new directory. You have to do the same with any support programs such as TrainzObjects.

If you use an existing hard drive as I did you have to change the jumpers on the hard drive to change it from a master drive to a slave drive.

Earl