External Drive Housings

I found a useful product for travelers or people who've upgraded laptops recently. You can buy an external hard drive housing for about $20-30 and convert any internal IDE drive to an external USB hard drive. It's much cheaper than buying a dedicated external drive, and it's a real convenient way to keep data around from an old computer. Plus, you can always put the drive back into a laptop later on. It took about five minutes to pull the old drive and install it in the casing.

This will be useful for backing up and transferring data where power and network outages are common, or where bandwidth is limited or non-existent. We also have a nice little 1gig flash thumb drive for the same purpose, but it was quite expensive.