The dinky little 1TB laptop hard drive in an external enclosure I've been using for the Star Trek Archive up until now is just about full. I can do Season 3, maybe Season 4, but after that it simply won't have enough room left. Before compressing, a season of TNG takes up about 120-150GB, and even after compressing it still takes up about 60-65.
So at first the solution was simple - get a bigger hard drive. It seemed the cheapest option for 4TB was to buy a desktop HDD and an external enclosure - this was somehow cheaper than buying a drive already in an enclosure.
But then. I had a way cooler, way nerdier idea. I wondered if this product even existed. A brief search later, I confirmed that it does.
Feast your eyes upon the StarTech 5.25" Removable Hard Drive Bay:
It's exactly what it looks like - you slot it into a free 5.25" bay, connect the SATA plugs to the back of it, and then poof you have a hot-swappable SATA hard drive bay built into the front of your PC, just like the big boy servers! (Making a SATA connection hot-swappable is a setting you will likely have to turn on in your BIOS/UEFI setup, so don't forget to do that if you get one of these.)
It's only $10 more than a good quality external drive enclosure and infinitely cooler so I'll be getting that, naturally. It even has a little lock! With keys! Holy shit!! !!! !
Gotta love brands like StarTech that just make the weirdest most specific accessories you'd never know about unless you specifically needed it, and their stuff always built to a reasonable quality.
Cursed adapter chains are weird because you have two possibilities: they work, and you go "yeah, that makes sense I guess," or they don't work, and you go "yeah, that makes sense I guess."
