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.
But you see that patch of several layers of masking tape on the corner? Yeah that's to cover up the ungodly bright blue LED this thing has on the front.
THE BLUE LED PLAGUE STRIKES AGAIN
and I really don't wanna disassemble the fucker just to unplug it. I'll probably get a much smaller, less noticeable piece of black electrical tape and just put that over it. Fuck blue LEDs. Only tasteful implementation of one of those I've seen is actually in the Pioneer blu-ray drive right above it in this picture. It has a blue activity LED that's very dim and hidden behind smoky black plastic so you don't see it unless you're LOOKING at it and it doesn't light up a whole goddamn room, imagine that?
Anyways I have a 4TB hard drive in that dock rn and I'm about to have TNG Season 4's special features uploaded, and then we get to do Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country which will be a unique journey in its own right that I'll make another post about.
