Filed under: Accessories, Hardware, Peripherals, Odds and ends
A house for your homeless 2.5" SATA drive
Are you wondering what to do with the 2.5" SATA drive that you yanked out of your MacBook or Mac mini so you could replace it with a SATA Solid State Drive? For $19.99, the OWC Express USB 2.0 bus-powered enclosure provides a new home for that old drive so you can use it as a backup or spare drive.The Express enclosure is just slightly larger than an iPhone at 3.07" x 5.12" x .55" (78mm x 130mm x 14mm), and weighs just 2 ounces (56g) empty. Just toss in your old 2.5" SATA drive and you have a bus-powered USB 2.0 drive that easily fits in your pocket. You can also shop around for new bare SATA drives; a 500GB, 5400 RPM drive can be had for as low as US$97 (I'm sure you can find them for less!), making for a low-cost and portable backup solution.
There are other similar USB 2.0 enclosures out there; MacAlly's PHR-250A (US$19) and StarTech SAT2510U2 Infosafe (US$17.96) are about the same size and weight as the Express, while the Vantec NexStar SX NST-285S2-BK (US$22.02) and Sabrent EC-UST25 (US$14.97) are larger and heavier.
What's your favorite use for disk drives that you've pulled out of your Macs? Leave a comment below.
![TUAW [Cafepress]](http://www.blogsmithmedia.com/www.tuaw.com/media/tuaw-cafepress-promo.png)
