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Portable USB Drive Enclosures: Don't be without them!
A few days ago I was minding my own business, doing something on my computer, when the power went out. I have a UPS so this shouldn't be a big deal, but sometimes UPS's fall over dead and don't tell you. Apparently mine had, as my computer immediately turned off. The power was only out for 30 seconds, but my computer was somehow toasted. I couldn't even get it to display the BIOS, though it did turn on enough to blink keyboard lights.
Lying around the house we had an IDE/SATA USB drive enclosure and its little cousin a laptop-sized one. Since the first concern is always "can I recover my hard drive data, or even better, repair the hard drive?" we took out the hard drives and one by one put them into the enclosure. It's got just thumb screws so you don't need a screwdriver, and you just put the drive in, plug it into a power source, hook up the enclosure to a computer's USB port, and turn on the enclosure. Using this I was able to mount the LVM partitions (I'm starting to wonder if I keep wanting to use these, I always forget how to do the LVM part in between catastrophes and I never use/need the cool stuff LVM can do), run a filesystem check/repair, and see my data. Better yet, I then was able to plug them back into my computer and boot it with no problem.
I have no relationship with Sabrent. The enclosures are just mucho useful. :)