I regularly deal with external hard-drives, be it for data backup or if I’m rescuing a client’s hard-drive from uncertain death.

Since the idea of opening my PC on a regular basis to connect a drive is a bit of a turn off, I used to use an external USB drive enclosure. This works fine, but it’s a bit slow (well, at least until USB 3.0 makes its debut). The eSATA standard allows you to connect external drives at full SATA speed, but it’s not cost-effective to buy an enclosure for every external drive you have.

Enter the Docking Bay. This is a simple weighed base that allows you to connect a hard-drive in a similar way to how you used to plug in game cartridges into a classic game console like the Atari 2600. You can then eject the hard-drive and plug another one in, all without restarting the PC.

This is a review of one such Docking Bay and how it works with Ubuntu, including the wonders of hot-swapping.

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