The trouble with conventional hard drive enclosures is that if you just want to hook up a particular drive to quickly grab some files off of it, you have to go through the hassle of unscrewing the enclosure, taking out the old drive, making sure you’ve got the right adapter to fit the new drive, closing it all back up, and man, oh man, all of a sudden it’s 4:00 in the afternoon. This external drive whatsit from ThinkGeek interfaces with just about any standard hard drive, be it IDE or SATA, laptop or desktop, and lets you swap them out quickly.
It connects via USB and costs $25. Drive compatibility includes: 3.5″ and 2.5″ IDE, 1.8″ micro IDE, 3.5″ and 2.5″ SATA, and it’ll also handle standard IDE and SATA optical drives too. I would have liked something like this back in my days as an A+ certified computer repair technician. Those were the days. And by “those were the days” I mean “I don’t miss those days.”
USB to SATA/IDE Combo Kit [ThinkGeek.com]