Make a drive caddy out of cardboard

Just upgraded your hard drive and not sure what to do with the old one? Why not recycle it into an environmentally friendly external drive for backing up game saves and the like with a cardboard case?

That's what's on offer with the rather remarkable BytePac hard drive enclosures. Order one, and you'll receive a box full of SATA to USB cables in the post. Empty the box out and you can fit a standard 3.5inch drive inside with plenty of room for air flow. It's fully recycled and recyclable, guaranteed for five years and designed to look like a magazine boxfile for archiving and labelling multiple drives full of old game saves and screenshots.

Admittedly, the chances that you've upgraded your storage lately are fairly slim, given the price of hard drives at the moment. Even so, if you've got an old drive or two kicking around in the bottom of a drawer, this seems like a good way to put them to use.

The design has apparently been stress tested by opening and closing the main flap 10,000 times, but even so I'm not sure the cardboard case will be rugged enough for moving the drive around much. Still, if your router has a USB port around the back this could be a great way to set up a down and dirty NAS drive. I can see it working really well with something like PogoPlug , for example, for serving up videos around the home or making your own personal cloud service.

It's a neat idea even if - as the manufacturer admits - at £29.45 for the full set of leads and three boxes it's a bit pricey for what it is. Still, they win kudos back for actively encouraging you to copy them and build your own cardboard caddy if you want to.

The video below has more details about Bytepac, and there's even more info over in the product FAQs.

(via Scienceblogs )