I have quite a number (about 20) of 3½ inch hard disks at home. Some are IDE hard disks and some are SATA hard disks. Putting each of them into casing is just too costly. Further more, 3½ inch hard disks are not really that portable as they need external power.
For those SATA hard disks, I have been using NexStar docking stations which cost about $50 each. I have a white one and a black one.
The NexStar docking station comes with both USB and eSATA interface and an ON/OFF button.
However, NexStar docking station only supports SATA hard disks.
I have been using my two NexStar docking stations with all my 3½ inch SATA hard disks as storage media. Network storage station which costs about $150 to $200 for one hard disk is just too expensive as a solution.
However, those 3½ inch IDE hard disks are really problematic. To throw away IDE hard disks with storage capacity about 250G to 300G is just too wasteful. I have been looking for docking station for 3½ inch IDE hard disks for quite a while but could not find any. The solution till now is to use those cheapo IDE to USB connectors that do not really function well and cost about $10 to $20 each..
I was in Sim Lim Square today and it was a pleasant surprise that I found an All in 1 HDD Docking Station that supports two 3½ inch hard disks, one SATA and one IDE.
On top of that, it also supports xD, compact flash, memory stick, SD and TC multimedia flash memory cards. There are 2 USB connections too.
There is an ON/OFF switch at the back. It comes with both USB and eSATA interface.
On top of that, the docking station comes with a red button for one button backup and high speed disk cloning which can be done offline too. The price tag was $72 but the shop owner sold it to me for $70 and replace the original power cable with a three pin plug that has no fuse to one that comes with fuse. Wonderful, but it is made in China of course. Let me try it out and see how reliable it is. If it is good, I will get one more for sure.
