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Heather Clancy
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Breathe life into an old hard drive, avoiding electronic waste

By | July 9, 2010, 12:30am PDT

This is a rather simple green IT product that is green in the sense that it might help you extend the life of an old hard drive. And you all know that data storage is just one of those things that we can’t seem to get enough of.

The CDD2000 USB 3.0 Hard Drive Docking Station from Cirago International is a SuperSpeed USB 3.0 gadget that serves (as you might expect) as a plug-and-play home base for 2.5-inch and 3.5-inch SATA I and II hard drives. The idea is that you can upgrade your computer while still having access to all the stored data. You can think of it as “recycling” your hard drive, and with a retail price of just under $50, it’s certainly not all that cost-prohibitive.

The technology DOES require USB 3.0 support in order to work at its optimum capacity, but it is backwards compatible with USB 2.0 and USB 1.1.

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Hard Drive, Life, Heather Clancy

Heather Clancy is an award-winning business journalist with a passion for green technology and corporate sustainability issues.

Disclosure

Heather Clancy

Writing publicly about what the high-tech industry is actually doing to help itself and the world get greener or more sustainable is one way I figure I can contribute more meaningfully to said effort. I am also a big OMG-kind-of-fan of smart leadership, which is why the goodly folks who publish this blog let me go on about this topic and why I am always on the hunt for forward-looking business management ideas.

My daily writing is focused on looking for topics for my blogs, GreenTech Pastures and Business Brains. I also write often about emerging technology trends such as mobile computing, unified communications and cloud computing. Occasionally, I will pop up at an industry conference in some sort of speaking capacity. In cases where a speaking engagement involves a sponsor that may be covered in this blog, that fact will be disclosed in coverage as appropriate.

My corporate writing work usually consists of crafting research white papers about some aspect of technology. In the event that my commentary (in written, audio or video form) mentions a company for which I have provided consulting advice, I will disclose that fact. However, there is no connection between these projects and the topics that I am covering in my blog.

Biography

Heather Clancy

Heather Clancy is an award-winning business journalist with a passion for green technology and corporate sustainability issues. Her articles have appeared in Entrepreneur, Fortune Small Business, The International Herald Tribune and The New York Times. In a past corporate life, Heather was editor of Computer Reseller News, where she was a featured speaker about everything from software as a service to IT security to mobile computing.

Heather started her journalism life as a business writer with United Press International in New York. She holds a B.A. in English literature from McGill University in Montreal, Quebec, and has a thing for Lewis Carroll.

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I Agree!
ncironman 12th Jul 2010
@Rick_R
After reading your post I went and looked in the cardboard box in the corner of my closet. I have 28 old hard drives! All are IDE. Capacities range from 20GB (I've had PC's since Apple 2E w/ Floppies only) to 150GB. Then there are the unused SATA 1 & 2's up to 500 GB. Now have a Core7 new machine w/Intel MoBo and dual 1.5 TB drives mirrored in RAID with a PCI card (NOT the built in RAID on the MoBo, learned my lesson on that with the last box)! Automated backups run EVERY night at midnight to an external 2TB NAS (Acronis Hom 2010 - good program!) Have a second identical 2TB external drive. On the 1st of every month the "in use back up drive" goes into the home "fire safe" or the "safty deposit box" at the bank (usually)! Curious about cloud back up's too but just am not satisfied with the security and stability of those choices? We run a small commercial service business (28 years & going strong), so I obviously consider my data EXTREMELY important! I'm no IT engineer but feel like I take the necessary precautions?

All that being said, I agree with many of the post on this device. TOO expensive! There are many available devices that do the same thing fir IDE & SATA. I have both that I bought from Merit-Line. I use them regularly and highly recommend them both. And a he// of allot cheaper!
Cheers all.
View in thread
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Got to give them an A for their creative marketing campaign.
ye 9th Jul 2010
Though I think it's stretching it to say this is green.
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Isn't everything "green" now?
JohnMcGrew@... 9th Jul 2010
It's just like a dozen years ago when everything from floppy disks to your toothbrush was sold as "Internet Ready".
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True.
ye 9th Jul 2010
@JohnMcGrew@: Isn't everything "green" now?

It really is getting pathetic.
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RE: Breathe life into an old hard drive, avoiding electronic waste
Pete "athynz" Athens 9th Jul 2010
@JohnMcGrew@... And I'm STILL waiting on the internet connection to my toothbrush... LOL
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RE: Breathe life into an old hard drive, avoiding electronic waste
grassdogstudio 9th Jul 2010
@JohnMcGrew@...

I tried to order a USB waffle iron from Think Geek once.
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RE: Breathe life into an old hard drive, avoiding electronic waste
BobinAtlanta 9th Jul 2010
It is green in that they are not thrown in a landfill somewhere.
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Wow!
kd5auq 9th Jul 2010
A product I would actually want?
What's the catch?
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Misses the mark
wkulecz Updated - 9th Jul 2010
To really add new life to old hard drives instead of having them trashed it needs to support IDE drives. SATA isn't that old, and its easy to find a computer to plug them into, not so with all the old 100-500GB IDE drives floating around.

Besides, there are several competitors that have been available for almost as long as SATA has, that you can buy for $25-30, they are "only" USB2, but USB3 ain't worth the extra cost yet, since so few computers have them and the old drives aren't fast enough to need it.
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Agreed
JohnMcGrew@... 9th Jul 2010
I've got a stack of functional IDE drives that I might consider purchasing a device like this for. But then again, like you said, you can also get cheap IDE-USB adapters for $10 or so. Not as attractive, but just as functional.
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RE: Breathe life into an old hard drive, avoiding electronic waste
sfielding7@... 9th Jul 2010
@wkulecz
there are unit available that do both IDE and SATA at the same time
I use one for hard drive data recovery as well as data backup
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RE: Breathe life into an old hard drive, avoiding electronic waste
Hameiri 9th Jul 2010
If you actually read any of the environmental publications you'd find one of their pillars of their plan is to get people to use their devices longer. This is one of the reasons that Obama's cash for clunkers was definitely NOT environmental.

The reason is when you use what you have you are maximizing the use of the energy and resources used to manufacture the device. Once you dump it, it takes more energy to dispose of the device and even more energy to create another one that you will buy new. Yes hoarders... you are more environmental than those rich people that lose, break and throw out so much stuff.
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RE: Breathe life into an old hard drive, avoiding electronic waste
Barc777 9th Jul 2010
@Hameiri

But the power to run those older drives, versus the capacity they have, is clearly higher/unit.
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Size matters ...
Rick_R 9th Jul 2010
I have drives, mainly IDE, ranging from about three 40GB's, two 80's, a 200 and a 500GB SATA. About a year ago I bought a 1TB SATA for external backup and a few months ago a 1.5TB mainly for more speed. The 1.5TB has about 979 GB free. Pretty much every one cost about $100 at the time and they all still work fine.

You can get 500GB SATA drives for $40. How many people actually NEED 1+TB of storage? The dock is like a box full of remotes--except with remotes you don't have a choice. Realistically, how many people are going to want to keep a bunch of 100GB drives around (most of which WILL be IDE) when they could just copy everything to their main drive and still have more than half the disk empty?
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RE: Breathe life into an old hard drive, avoiding electronic waste
brucelparsons@... 9th Jul 2010
@Rick_R
Keeping all your data on one harddrive is like the old adage about keeping all your eggs in one basket. I would rather distribute my data over a few medium size harddrives in order to mitigate the damage in the event of a HD failure. Or better yet, two HDs with redundant backups.
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RE: Breathe life into an old hard drive, avoiding electronic waste
Rick_R 9th Jul 2010
@brucelparsons@...
I'm not saying a person can't have backups. Realistically, if the data is still of some use, who wants to have to search through a bunch of separate drives, plugging them in one at a time?

Plus, as Robin Harris pointed out awhile back, the smaller a drive is in storage capacity, the lower the maximum data transfer rate.

And we're not really talking about "I replaced my 500GB drive with a 1+TB drive." With something that large most people would just leave the existing drive and add a second. This is more about someone having a 500GB+ drive available for $40+ and instead spreading data out over a bunch of 80-160GB drives "just to be green".
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I Agree!
ncironman 12th Jul 2010
@Rick_R
After reading your post I went and looked in the cardboard box in the corner of my closet. I have 28 old hard drives! All are IDE. Capacities range from 20GB (I've had PC's since Apple 2E w/ Floppies only) to 150GB. Then there are the unused SATA 1 & 2's up to 500 GB. Now have a Core7 new machine w/Intel MoBo and dual 1.5 TB drives mirrored in RAID with a PCI card (NOT the built in RAID on the MoBo, learned my lesson on that with the last box)! Automated backups run EVERY night at midnight to an external 2TB NAS (Acronis Hom 2010 - good program!) Have a second identical 2TB external drive. On the 1st of every month the "in use back up drive" goes into the home "fire safe" or the "safty deposit box" at the bank (usually)! Curious about cloud back up's too but just am not satisfied with the security and stability of those choices? We run a small commercial service business (28 years & going strong), so I obviously consider my data EXTREMELY important! I'm no IT engineer but feel like I take the necessary precautions?

All that being said, I agree with many of the post on this device. TOO expensive! There are many available devices that do the same thing fir IDE & SATA. I have both that I bought from Merit-Line. I use them regularly and highly recommend them both. And a he// of allot cheaper!
Cheers all.
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RE: Breathe life into an old hard drive, avoiding electronic waste
jkohut 9th Jul 2010
Seems like this could provide some value in the future. As someone else pointed out, part of being green is Re-Use. This device helps accomplish that. Also, cost now is $50, that cost may come down, about the time that many of the SATA drives start becoming "extras", which should be soon. What the article doesn't say (and even the link to the vendor doesn't) is that this is capable of Raid (at least mirroring). If I am going to put stuff onto OLD hard drives(i.e. likely to fail), it would be nice if I could use this device to mirror two drives (yes, theoretically I could back it up). Making this device capable of mirroring would allow the older drives to have significantly more value in that, if one drive failed, it would not loose the data completely. I would give this device, for the price, 3 stars out of 5.
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You can get a USB hard drive case for $10 now.
roncemer 9th Jul 2010
Why spend $50 on one? Just because it can handle multiple different sizes of drives, or multiple different drives? You'll destroy the connectors plugging and unplugging the drives repeatedly anyway. Besides, who has that many drives?

You can get 2.5-inch USB hard drive cases for $10, and 3.5-inch cases for $15, so why not put each drive into its own case and have it be properly protected from physical and electrical damage?

I doubt this thing will find much of a market.
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RE: Breathe life into an old hard drive, avoiding electronic waste
Barc777 9th Jul 2010
@roncemer

Enclosures are for those who want to keep using the older drives, which is more what Ms. Clancy should be thinking of instead of a dock, which is for relatively quick removal and replacement.

I think the real market for this is for techs who need to quickly copy data from older drives of many machines to a server or shared network resource. The non-IT supervisor of our IT shop doesn't want the users to have large HDs, because "it would take longer to back up all that data, and we'd also run out of room on the backup media." (Yeah, right! Just because the capacity is there doesn't mean that users will fill it.) That means that most of our older SATA drives are 80 GB.

Yes, we also have a number of even older IDE drives as well. We save those for slack times, and have fun physically destroying them. Sometimes we use a hammer; other times we take 'em apart and scratch the heck out of the platters. High tech stress relievers. happy
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RE: Breathe life into an old hard drive, avoiding electronic waste
GrizzledGeezer 9th Jul 2010
Duh...

What you want is an interface for a non-SATA drive. It's the old ATA drives that need to be recycled to newer machines.
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Thats not what I'd call green. Or new.
SiO2 9th Jul 2010
I already have one of those, but its USB2 and IDE. I havent even seen any USB3 stuff yet, much less needed it.

I dont have any SATA drives that I'd call obsolete yet, but plenty of IDE ones that are.

Like my existing one, whats the point really, when they are delicate and more likely to fail than the one in my system - and so small I couldnt back up to them anyway. Not that I'd want to of course... If I want to get to it quick, its on my 1TB, and if not, its safely archived. I keep DVDs of my stuff and a redundant copy of my XP and Lucid partitions and hardly ever use the interface.

A much better way of recycling old hard drives is to get a decent education in electronics and build a clock, speaker system, wall-o-scope musical display or one of many fun things from the likes of Instructables dot com.

My mum likes the platters, she hangs them to scare pests off her garden. Now thats green...
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Start a reef!
FiOS-Dave 9th Jul 2010
If some organization were to collect thousands or millions of old hard drives, they could be used to start a reef, somewhere.
This might be more ecologically sound than other ideas...
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Nice idea in principle
SiO2 9th Jul 2010
@FiOS-Dave
...but I'd find something less volatile to put in salt water than the aluminium those things are predominantly made from.

In a matter of weeks they'd be a pile of hydroxides, with a little platinum poking out here and there. Not the best habitat for a filter-feeder that makes its home from calcites...

Peace
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RE: Breathe life into an old hard drive, avoiding electronic waste
aep528 9th Jul 2010
So I can buy a new device for $50, that used natural resources to build and ship, as well as additional electricity to power, or I could just copy the data off the drive and take it to a recycler for free?
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USB3 obsolete before available
Jim Johnson 9th Jul 2010
Why do I need USB 3.0?

eSATA is much faster. Many notebooks now support it via eSATA/USB2 combo port. For desktops it is just a short inexpensive cable with backplate from internal SATA to the external eSATA connector (no electronics needed).

Digital video is deeply partnered with Firewire and goes up to 800mbps.

I suppose that leaves thumbdrives, but if I need something other than a USB 1/2 connector to do USB3, why not the inverse of the combo eSATA/USB connector on laptops?

In my opinion USB 3.0 is too late to market - - but I'm sure marketing folks will be trying to sell enough to recover the R&D costs.
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Old news
TrueDinosaur 9th Jul 2010
Not new. The Thermaltake BlacX has been out for a couple of years. I have 2. And they support eSata. The fun was having a RaptorX HD with the clear cover so you could watch the heads move. I had a programmer friend write a program to do random reads so I could exercise the drive and watch the activity. Takes me back to the IBM 2311 disk drive with the clear cabinet.
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RE: Breathe life into an old hard drive, avoiding electronic waste
rmckay3688@... 9th Jul 2010
that what they should call it! E-wasted funds
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The only green I see...
JoeBob_z 9th Jul 2010
to be blunt, is the green ZD gets for this product placement in your blog.

Get real - you can get a USB 2.0 dock for half that, or less, and unless you're using it to compile the 2010 census you probably won't see any real performance difference. Since it's a 2.0 device it will use less power, actually making it GREENER than this 3.0 farce.

Stop insulting your readers. ZD is already on the ropes as far as credibility; using your columns as advertising space will wreck whatever may be left.
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RE: Breathe life into an old hard drive, avoiding electronic waste
[deXter] 9th Jul 2010
How is this being environment friendly, when you can reuse both IDE as well as SATA drives for just $1? The whole docking bit is completely unnecessary when all you need is a simple adapter/cable.

C'mon ZDNet, you can do better than that.
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RE: Breathe life into an old hard drive, avoiding electronic waste
docrabbitt@... 10th Jul 2010
I have a internet ready USB pet rock does that count

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