S35DC Docking Station 3.5" & 2.5" SATA Hard Drive USB2 & e-SATA w/ eSATA Adapter (http://www.allcam.biz/catalog/product_info.php?ref=7&products_id=693)

These are just coming out. The fact that this one is eSATA is a plus.

So.....now you can have one of these, and a pile of bare drives with your projects on to quickly access/refer back to in the future.

..and i'll be seconding how great and more cost efficient these are...

certainly beats my huge stack of external HDDs!

..and i'll be seconding how great and more cost efficient these are...

certainly beats my huge stack of external HDDs!

But I should mention that they are slow..... very slow. Don't edit from the drives. NOTE: I don't have the exact model in the link.... I have a USB2.0 dock.

Will it work on a mac ??/

But I should mention that they are slow..... very slow. Don't edit from the drives. NOTE: I don't have the exact model in the link.... I have a USB2.0 dock.

The eSATA drive will be faster then the USB 2.0. Fast enough to edit from.

My concern is, they are not in an enclosure and I feel like they would be susceptible to damage.

Will it work on a mac ??/

Yes. It will.

Jason:
LOL, i would never think to edit from them!

But I should mention that they are slow..... very slow. Don't edit from the drives. NOTE: I don't have the exact model in the link.... I have a USB2.0 dock.


Er...actually, you can without any issue whatsoever. eSATA (external SATA) is merely a route to get one of your motherboards internal SATA connections to the outside world. It performs exactly the same way as it would inside your PC.

External usb/firewire drives require a bridge to convert the data, which acts as a bottleneck. eSATA doesn't!

So....these eSATA versions ARE ideal for editing from and hot swapping drives.

Serial ATA - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serial_ATA)

The chart on the link above shows how the transfer speeds compare for the various formats and you will see that eSATA is WAY ahead of the current crop.

USB2 transfer speeds are 60MB/sec. eSATA is 300MB/sec!!!!!!!!!

For those of you using set ups like this for archiving, how do you store the internal drives?
Right now I have a few that are in their oversized original boxes.

As these are just coming out, I doubt there will be a big reply. I would imagine maybe an aluminium CD Flightcase could be modded with foam to takle the bare drives in anti-static bags.

Jason:
LOL, i would never think to edit from them!

I wouldn't either, but I have 2.25TB of video data, and that is sure as heck not going to fit inside of my alienware edit system (which has to 80GB PATA drives).

So the only way I can edit is via external systems. May be I need to get an external 1394 drive instead of USB2.0, but that is yet another expense and not something I can afford right now.

For those of you using set ups like this for archiving, how do you store the internal drives?
Right now I have a few that are in their oversized original boxes.

I hadn't got that far yet. I bought two docking stations (so I could mirror the data at the same time) but I had an emergency need for ALL the storage over this summer (not mirrored) and I haven't had time / money to purchase another set of drives to properly replicate the data.