External hard drives are a frequent sight on home office desks. Take a look at the statistics, though, and it quickly becomes clear that the most popular type of storage device is and remains the internal hard drive inside the computer itself.
Special docking stations, though, have been developed to move content easily from point A to B. A docking station accepts conventional internal hard drives and can be connected to the computer via a standard USB cable. The stations are well suited for old hard drives that you've taken out of a PC or laptop.
For laptops in particular the docking stations are a big help when an installed hard drive is replaced with a bigger model, says Hard Lehner from the electronics chain Conrad Elektronik. It makes the hard drive's data accessible even if it's already been removed.
"The docking station offers fast data transmission for relatively little money," Lehner says. Hard drives without casings are much cheaper than external hard drives," says Thomas Littschwager from Chip magazine.
"A docking station is certainly not something every user needs at home, but it does offer certain benefits if large volumes of data are being moved," he says.
There are docking stations compatible with 2.5 and 3.5 inch hard drives, notes Peter Tonev from Technaxx, a hardware maker in Germany. Some models even offer two hard drive slots so that two units can be run parallel.
The standard docking station uses a USB 2.0 connection to transfer data to the computer. "If you move around large volumes of data, USB 2.0 is not going to make you very happy, though," says Littschwager.
Models with a faster eSATA port are available to cure that problem. The hard drive in the docking station then runs just as fast as a hard drive installed within the computer itself, but you...
Posted: 2010-08-16 08:36:03
