When you’re shopping for an external hard drive, you could go the conventional route and use a drive that comes in a sealed, tomblike enclosure, or, for more flexibility, you could consider using a drive dock, which will allow you to quickly swap raw SATA hard drives in and out, as if they were CDs or floppy disks. Not only are raw SATA drives cheaper than external models, they also can save space: Set a drive-swapping enclosure on your desk and then keep the SATA drives themselves on a shelf, like old-school VHS tapes (you can find protective drive cases online for a few bucks each). If you frequently move large amounts of data around, it’s far more efficient than a desk full of bulky, conventional drives, each with its own cables and power supply.
