A quick change for hard drives

All the drives on my main PC are removable and with the SATA drives particularly it has struck me how simple it is to put an actual drive into the tray. Once, because I took a drive out of the tray to more safely drop a spot of oil on to the tiny fan within the tray and dropping on a little too much, I swapped the drive to another tray and because it was a snug fit I did not even bother to add the screws as I'd soon be putting it back in the tray it came from. Digressing: the advice I got to lubricate the fan was critical. They soon get noisy if you do not and I wonder how long the fan would then last. Now I've taken drive swapping a stage further. On the Zazz site in early March there was a "hard drive docking unit" for around $30. It is a small black box with a slot in the top that in turn has a a spring-loaded door with a small rectangular hole in one corner. At that corner in the bottom of the slot are the drive connectors. The small slot guides a 2.5-inch drive onto the connectors, and the spring loaded door opens to guide in a 3.5-inch drive. There's a USB connector and a small power plug to give it a 12v supply. To connect another hard drive just plug in the unit and slot in a drive. There's a single black button which when pressed forces the drive up off the connectors. So, as the box states, it takes 2 seconds to add or swap a hard drive (of course if it is not formatted it can then take you a while via Disk Manager to get it ready to use.) It is actually quicker and easier than putting in a DVD. Of course, since finding out these things existed I've found similar things on the Internet which will work for IDE drives too, but they have the problem that without an adapter the power is not as easy to connect. With a SATA drive the power goes in via the set of connectors also used for data. The IDE-capable ones tend to look more like USB docks but with longer slots but the molex connectors remain the problem and the IDE and combo dock makers seem to also offer molex removal tools. One also offers a neat miniature suitcase with adapters for just about every kind of drive including those from iPods. Lots of pics of one similar to the one I've got are at http://www.pcper.com/article.php?aid=524 though mine is unbranded. The unit works with Mac and Linux too, provided the drives you put in it are compatible.