That horrible sinking feeling which takes over when a hard disk fails to fire up as expected might well be cured with the help of a simple external enclosure which costs less than ?30. There must be many companies and individuals who use external drives for backing up data or who have failed computers stuffed full of SATA disks. When such a disaster happens, most people will simply assume that it's the drive itself which is at fault but, before binning these apparently dead hard disks, it's easy to check them out using a powered independent case, such as the Icy Box.
An Icy Box external enclosure using 'Easyswap' technology can reunite you with those files you thought you'd lost forever. Simply remove your SATA drive from its existing case or housing (which shouldn't involve more than a cross-head screwdriver and some nimble fingers), slide it into the new case so that it connects securely, close the enclosure's door and power the unit up. Connect the Icy Box to a USB port or hub and the chances are that the drive will fire up with your data intact.
This principle won't work if the drive is part of a RAID, of course, but it will at least confirm whether or not the drive is at fault. Icy boxes come in different flavours, including 2.5 inch IDE versions. Before binning those failed hard drives, these enclosures offer a low cost way of checking whether all is really lost. Check out the Icy Box at Maplin (www.maplin.co.uk) or find these units on Amazon.