Speaking of feeding hard drives to TiVos, one thing I love about Google is the amount of storage space available–I’m a bit of a data packrat. My near-obsession with storage means that I’ve accumulated enough of my own hard drives at home to form a geological strata at the bottom of a large bin I have. So how is a modern geek supposed to access all that data?
Enter the ComboDock from WiebeTech. It’s like a hard drive enclosure without the enclosure. Basically, you can leave a hard drive sitting right on your desk and just plug in power and data and you’re ready to start sucking data. The ComboDock that I ordered has both USB and FireWire ports.
As far as I can tell, WiebeTech is smallish business based in Wichita, Kansas; they introduce the people at the company by name. So now what I know about Kansas is
- They play some fierce basketball.
- They make some kickin’ USB/FireWire hard drive non-enclosures.
- Dorothy isn’t there anymore.
Note: it should go without saying that I write about/link to things because I want to, not for moolah–but I’ll say it anyway. I’d love to beta test the Yahoo Publisher Network (Jeremy, hook me up!), but even if I tried YPN or AdSense the money would get donated to charity. Anybody know of other hard drive non-enclosures?
Hi Matt,
I certainly don’t know much about hard drive non-enclosure, but ComboDock looks amazing. I’ll certainly look into it shortly.
Testimonials seem positive as well http://www.wiebetech.com/testimonials.php
Thanks for the tip.
We also have lots of cows, corn, wheat and one of the best state fairs in the midwest… That is of course if you like cows, corn, wheat and free samples…
I have spotted other Googler’s beta testing YPN… although I am pretty sure they didn’t use their @google.com email address to apply
When is Google going to buy TiVo or offer TV/Video search for TiVo? It be nice to be able to search my TiVo by day week or month for keywords example search keyword simpsons right then you get a list of when simpsons will be on for the whole day week or month then i can be able to bookmark it and set a reminder, iv seen a link to this before but i cant find it anymore Can Google please work with TiVo or just buy them and add search features.
When I worked for NCR/AT&T GIS/Symbios the RAID group was in Wichita. I wonder if it is some ofthe same crowd that started WeibeTech. Would not surprise me if it was.
My all time favorite non-enclosure was a bent piece of Lexan. I attached the power supplies to the back where the plastic was dent up at a 90 degree angle, and attached the drives on their sides by drilling screw holes into the plastic.
If a drive ran too hot, I could just attac a heat sink and fan wherever I needed it.
I never did take it in for FCC testing, but I’m sure that it would pass
Hell, the raidio would even work as long as it was on the other end of the room.
I’ve got seven decent-sized hard drives lying around, and use a 200 gig in an external enclosure. What I’d really like to do is plug all the drives into a single box that I can plug into my wireless network or USB hub. Is there a solution (say 12-25 HDs) that isn’t priced too high for home use?
I just use the external SATA connectors that my ASUS P5AD2-E provides. What kind of storage pakrat has time for IDE drives?
Hey Matt,
Nice solution, I personally use
http://www.adstech.com/products/DLX185/intro/DLX185intro.asp?pid=DLX185
This one from AdsTech is basically a enclosure that allows you to swap drives in and out, I use them to stack my drives and swap out every once in a while. It uses usb 2.0 to connect to your PC and if you have multiple ones, you simply need a usb hub.
well what i’d love to do is boot from one of those babies – that’d mean you could have a pc in three offices and just move the hard drive between them…. i know you can get supposedly get around the chipset issue in booting from xp (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/314082) but i just can’t find any examples of doing it over a USB connection… anyone done this before?
Wow. I’m from Wichita and am purely amazed that a company from Wichita (besides Coleman, Boeing, LearJet, Cessna) can make a product worthwhile the use of someone outside of Kansas, let alone Google elites.
I can not believe you forgot about Wildcat Football from K-State. And Dorthy presently resides deep inside the salt-mines of Hutchinson, Ks. Nobody really liked her anyway, so we hid her from the “funny” people who tell Dorthy jokes
Well, I’ve used “ordinary” external enclosures in that way, essentially the same way I’ll wire a drive directly into an open computer sometimes for short-term use. And an ordinary enclosure is 1/2 to 1/3 the price of the Combodock.
The ComboDock is, however, clearly *much* cooler.