If you’re a PowerMac or Mac Pro user, or use external storage devices with your Mac, you’ve probably got a few spare hard drives kicking around from various upgrades over the years that haven’t even been worth selling off with the plummeting prices of hard drives. Enter Sabrent’s DS-UBLK ($50) and EC-HDD2 ($70). Available on Amazon for roughly half their MSRPs, these external docking stations connect to your Mac using a fast USB 3.0 connection, and allow you to pop in any 3.5” or 2.5” SATA hard drive. This is great for recovering data from a retired internal drive, or putting old drives back into service for occasional offline backup.
While the DS-UBLK is a single-drive solution, the EC-HDD2 adds an extra bonus: the ability to clone one drive onto another without even needing to connect to a computer. Simply plug in a pair of drives—up to 3TB per bay—and the dock will provide super-fast 5Gbps data transfer between the two drives—a great and speedy way to upgrade your old hard drive to a larger capacity.
