PC Question: Does anyone make an external hard drive that...
 

is basically a shell connected via a USB cable, but can utilize actual standard hard drives?

I have all these older internal hard drives, would love to be able to swap them in and out of a "dock" or something based on need without having to open the case. Anything out there like that? Even Firewire is fine.

Yes, these exist. I've also got lots of old drives laying around and had the same idea, but after shopping around online I decided it just wasn't very cost-effective and a bit too much trouble (yeah, I'm lazy) compared with how cheap these massive new drives are.

Here ya go Mako... I just pulled apart one of the maxtor firewire externals I had for this same reason but you can buy one of these too:

http://www.servercase.com/miva/miva?/Merchant2/merchant.mv+Screen=PROD&Store_Code=SC&Product_Code =MS-350U&Category_Code=SCSI%2FUSB%2F1394+Enclosures


Good luck! :thumbsup

That's exactly what I just determined too Pro, thx for the tip.

Screw the old 30gb drives I have piling up, just far easier to buy a new 400gb unit and dump the small ones.

Thanks for the link though $pikes.

Yes thoses are the ones I use .

Ah dude, go to ebay.com and search for "USB EXTERNAL DRIVE" and you will get 100's of results on thsoe empty drive enclosures. I got mine fo $35 and works great. Supports up to a terabyte. THough a drive that big doen't exist as far as I know. Can even put a DVD burner in there instead if you wish