Hard Drive ‘Toaster’

I’ve been long plagued by disk space issues due to the fact that I often download and collect x264 encoded blu-ray rip movies at 720p/1080p resolutions. 720p ones are about 4GB while the 1080p ones are about 8GB average each, depending on the length of the video. So you can imagine how space-hungry these video files can be; 10 of them 1080p ones can easily gobble up 80GB of hard drive real estate.

So today I went out to get the solution to my problem, a Vantec NexStar Hard Drive Dock, or what I would prefer to call, a Hard Drive Toaster!

I got the one that comes with both USB 2.0 and eSATA ports. eSATA was the connection of choice to my home machine as transfer rates will be equivalent to that of an internal SATA port.

Now there was no point in my getting the ‘Toaster’ without ‘bread’ for it to ‘toast’, lol! So here it is in action, fully loaded with 1.0TB of Western Digital ammunition.

So the plan is pretty simple… Once this baby gets filled up with HD movie goodness, I’ll just press the button on the right to eject it and simply plug in a new empty drive then rinse and repeat! This will also come in handy when friends hand me their SATA drives for file sharing. No more case tinkering, just pop out and plug in!

Pretty soon, it may as well look like I’d need a drawer filled with silica gel to store the drives. I guess this is way better than storing stacks and stacks of DVD-R discs (not to mention most 1080p quality movies don’t eveb fit in a 4GB DVD-R and double-sided 8GB ones are just too expensive).

If you want a full hands-on review of this product, I recommend you look here. I got my unit from Compu-zone in Lowyat if you’re wondering where to get one for yourself. If you think you have a better solution for me to chuck my HD movie collection, feel free to leave a comment and let me know. Cheers!