Compared to disk drive caddies hard drive docks are relatively new on the scene. However, like their older brother these docks make utilizing old hard disk drives that are simply laying around very easy. In fact, docks are even easier to use than enclosure are. The best way to describe how hard drive docks work is to picture putting a piece of bread into a toaster or if you remember super Nintendo, it is like plugging a super Nintendo game cartridge into the console.
Two years ago, a 500 GB drive would have been considered quite large. However, 500 GB is relatively puny against today’s 2 TB behemoths. The rate of growth of disk storage space over the last 10 years has been nothing short of remarkable. Hard drive capacity has doubled every year, on average, during that time. At the same time, the cost per gigabyte has been inversely proportional to the increasing capacity. For example, in 1999, a 16 gig drive cost approximately $200 or about $12.50 per gigabyte. Today, you can purchase a 2 TB HDD for about $150 or about 7.5 cents per gigabyte. Drives from just over a decade ago were more than 160 times more expensive on a per gigabyte basis than they are today.
Upgrading this component has been one of the easiest ways to keep computers current. This has resulted in the side effect where many consumers own unused hard disk drives. This is unfortunate because these older hard drives are still perfectly good. Brando, a technology company based in Hong Kong, noticed that many drives were being needlessly thrown away or underutilized on some dusty shelf. It is true that enclosures were available at the time, but for some reason consumers were not using them very often. Some enclosures can be very difficult to use because they require screws to be unfastened before a drive is even inserted. Talk about inconvenient.
Instead, Brando developed the hard drive dock. The HDD dock is definitely an improvement over the enclosure. This is especially true for users to have a number of hard disks that they need to access frequently. All they have to do is plug their drive into the dock and it is ready to be used. If they want to use another drive, it is simply a matter of hitting the eject button, pulling the first drive out of the dock, and plugging in the second drive.
