{"id":12449,"date":"2011-11-04T09:37:03","date_gmt":"2011-11-04T14:37:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/eshop.macsales.com\/blog\/?p=12449"},"modified":"2014-05-22T13:31:45","modified_gmt":"2014-05-22T18:31:45","slug":"owc-options-address-hard-drive-shortage","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/eshop.macsales.com\/blog\/12449-owc-options-address-hard-drive-shortage\/","title":{"rendered":"OWC Options Address Hard Drive Shortage"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>Over the last week or so, we\u2019ve talked about the flooding situation in Thailand<\/a> and how it will likely result in a widespread shortage of platter-based drives.<\/a> In the wake of all this, a question has arisen: if you\u2019re running out of room, what does one do instead of trying to purchase a possibly non-existent hard drive or deleting files? After all, you need to store your files somehow<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Yes, this shortage is certainly inconvenient, but it helps if you look at it like this: it\u2019s not about what you can\u2019t <\/em>get; it\u2019s about making the most of what you already have<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Fortunately, a solution may be sitting in your basement, that bottom desk drawer or the old storage unit. If you\u2019ve been a computer user for more than a few years, there\u2019s a good chance that you have an older hard drive or two laying around unused. Sure, they\u2019re not the multi-terabyte, super-fast drives that we\u2019ve been seeing recently, but in a pinch, 80GB is 80GB.<\/p>\n

Connecting the Drives<\/h2>\n

The trick is, of course, mounting those drives on your desktop, so you can transfer files over to them. Fortunately, OWC has a number of different options for using those older drives externally with your current system. Let\u2019s take a look at the different options.<\/p>\n

Newer Technology SuperSpeed USB 3.0\/2.0 Universal Drive Adapter<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>We call this product our \u201cSwiss Army Knife\u201d of drive tools. Whatever drive you have – IDE\/ATA or SATA, 2.5 or 3.5 inch, this handy little kit allows you to connect it to your computer via USB.<\/p>\n

Even under \u201cnormal\u201d circumstances, the Newer Technology SuperSpeed USB 3.0\/2.0 Universal Drive Adapter<\/a> is an excellent addition to your tool kit. Now, it lets you take advantage of any of your \u201cold\u201d hard drives and give it new life.<\/p>\n

Use if: <\/strong>You have IDE\/ATA drives or a mixture of IDE\/ATA and SATA drives that you\u2019d like to connect to your computer via USB.<\/p>\n

Newer Technology Voyager<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>The Newer Technology Voyager series of drive docks<\/a> allow you to access any 2.5\u201d or 3.5\u201d SATA drive simply by sliding it into the unit. The S3 model connects either by USB 3.0\/2.0 or eSATA, while the Q model also adds FireWire 400 and 800 connections to the mix.<\/p>\n

While this drive dock is great for transporting drives between different workstations (our video department uses them extensively), it also works quite well for swapping between a large number of SATA hard drives.<\/p>\n

Use if: <\/strong>You have SATA drives you would like to connect to individually.<\/p>\n

External Enclosures<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>When it comes to keeping drives attached on a more permanent basis, an external hard drive enclosure<\/a> offers a great balance of protection and convenience.<\/p>\n

By putting those old hard drive in external enclosures, you can access more than one drive at a time, which is convenient when swapping files between them. Since many of our enclosures are stackable and daisy-chainable, you can get the storage of multiple drives in the desk space of a single one.<\/p>\n

Use if: <\/strong>You want to use your hard drive as a longer-term solution.<\/p>\n

Any of these options will work, it\u2019s just a matter of which one works best with the drives you already have.<\/p>\n

Using the Drives<\/h2>\n

Once you have your old drive attached to your computer, you\u2019ll probably want to go through it to make sure that there\u2019s nothing in there you want to keep – if there is, you can burn those files to a CD\/DVD or just drag them to another drive (such as your computer\u2019s internal hard drive) temporarily and drag it back later.<\/p>\n

Once you\u2019re sure that there\u2019s nothing on the drive that you don\u2019t have a copy of somewhere else, you\u2019ll probably want to reformat the drive. If you don\u2019t know the best way to do that, we have step-by-step walkthroughs for formatting your hard drive<\/a> in our Tech Center.<\/p>\n

Once you\u2019ve done that, you can either use the drive as an active storage device or\u2014possibly more effectively\u2014offload older, infrequently-used files to it, freeing up room on your main drive. However you choose to store your data, though, using those drives you already own could provide enough room to hold you over until this drive shortage has been resolved.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Over the last week or so, we\u2019ve talked about the flooding situation in Thailand and how it will likely result in a widespread shortage of platter-based drives. In the wake of all this, a question has arisen: if you\u2019re running out of room, what does one do instead of trying to purchase a possibly non-existent […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":2679,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"spay_email":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[339,4],"class_list":["post-12449","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-product-spotlight","category-tech-tips"],"yoast_head":"\nOWC Options Address Hard Drive Shortage<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"The Hard Drive shortage is inconvenient, but it helps if you look at it as not about what you can\u2019t get, but about making the most of what you already have.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" 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