Anybody who's heard Kate Bush's classic 'The Dreaming' album, specifically the song 'Sat in your lap', may have been wondering why her exquisite voice should be heard warbling about SATA drives: "Some say that knowledge is something SATA in your lap." Beats me.

Anyway, after two Serial ATA (SATA) hard disk enclosures have broken on me after the original purchase of a Western Digital MyBook World Edition - based on the WD 500GB NAS Caviar hard disk, I decided whilst ambling through Maplins, to invest some folding drink vouchers on a CnM HDD Docking Station (pictured above).

All you have to do is clip the SATA drive into the device, connect up the power and USB cable and you're ready to roll. The downside? Well, the drive electronics are exposed and I suspect it wouldn't take kindly to having a cup of coffee dropped over it. I tend to pull the drive and put it into one of those anti-static packages and pop it back it when it's needed, since I don't think it would be that safe to leave it in clear view.

So far I've had no problems and it's normally used to mirror work files stored on a data partition carved off the main system OS drive. If you come by any more SATA drives, these can be interchanged quickly. Hopefully, that solves the problem.