Your secret weapon for the storage apocalypse

Somehow, we’ve gone from casually wondering if we should buy extra storage to a Mad Max-like hellscape where we scrabble in the dirt for an extra terabyte. If this is going to be our future — and in all seriousness, it doesn’t look far off — there’s a product you can buy that can help set you up for success.

We’ve written about network-attached storage (NAS) drives before, which are wonderful for connecting a single drive to your network. Media professionals invest in RAID, which combines a handful of storage drives into a single unit. Soon, we could be tossing out these niceties and focusing more on cheap, bulk storage instead.

When we do, it might be the time for hard-drive docking stations and enclosures to shine.

Used hardware is where the deals are now

In an ideal world, you’d build a new PC, top to bottom: power supply, motherboard, CPU, GPU, storage, memory. But we know that prices are soaring on the latter three. For a brief time, hard drives were an answer: slower but cheaper than an SSD, but they could be added to a desktop or bought as an external storage solution. Yet hard drive prices have been spiking, too: WD now says that it’s sold out for 2026. Yes, the company will still sell consumer hard drives, but the bulk of its manufacturing output is going to AI hyperscalers, where the real money is at.

But there’s still a niche opportunity for those who are willing to keep their eyes open: used hardware. Specifically the kind sold at government auctions or on Facebook Marketplace. Sure, it’s a risk, but one that might just pay off.

If you’re a PC gamer, you probably know that you can run games from the Steam gaming service from various locations, even an external drive. You’ll benefit from a faster drive with a faster interface, like an SSD. In the worst case, you can store your Steam games on the slower, external storage and then move them over to an internal SSD when you want to play them. It’s a process that will require a few minutes to move the game and then for Steam to verify it, but it works. It’s similar to the way Microsoft’s Xbox Series X works: You must run the Series X games from an approved internal or external SSD, but you can store them on an external hard drive.

Here’s the thing: You don’t need to buy an internal or external SSD, or even an external hard drive in a nice little package. Pretty much any internal hard drive will do as far as a hard-drive docking station goes, and that’s an opportunity to snap up cheap storage that your neighbors don’t know about.

This might not be the best example (these have unrecoverable sectors), but I was able to find someone selling a few hard drives in the Bay Area on the cheap in just a few minutes. (Used hardware comes with some risks: Even drives that might be working perfectly now might be near the end of their service life. You could ask the seller for the manufacturing date or even to run a utility like CrystalDiskMark to try and figure out how long the drive has been powered on, but the seller might not know or be willing to do that.)

Consider, for example, $80 for 13TB of external storage. Buying new might bring with it an unsullied hard drive and higher performance — but at a higher price. Amazon sells a 10TB WD Blue drive for $239.

A hard-drive dock / enclosure is your answer

Connecting these drives to your PC is easier than you think, but we want a solution that accommodates flexibility above all else. RAID is a terrific way to preserve data, using redundancy, but it works best when all of the drives are the same capacity and performance. NAS works wonderfully, too, but building something like a media server is a separate project.

So what is a hard-drive docking station? It can be as simple as a “toaster” model: You take the external hard drive, slide it into a slot, and then connect the dock to your PC. The PC sees the hard drive and its storage, just as if it were inside the PC. Some docks use cubbies to hold the drives, or allow you to screw them in to secure them. Others have the ability to clone drives, add NAS functions, and so on.

For me, Cenmate’s 4-bay dock / enclosure ($129, at press time) is a good buy, for several reasons.

First, Cenmate’s dock accommodates 2.5-inch and 3.5-inch drives, and it’s toolless; a number of other hard drive docks and enclosures require you to screw in the drives. Cenmate’s drives are hot-swappable, just like removing a USB key from your PC. Second, I prefer a dock that matches with the 10Gbps USB-C port on my PC, and this dock does. (Many other docks include a 5Gbps interface, and that might be fine for an older hard drive. In this case, the 10Gbps interface doesn’t seem to come at a price premium.) Finally, Cenmate’s dock includes a cooling fan, though it might be a little on the loud side for some.

(My runner-up choice is Sabrent’s 4-bay USB 3.0 option for $99.95, but I haven’t tried it.) There are other options which include SSD mounts, as well.

The nice thing about these docks are that they’re essentially just a collection of drives, and little more. If you’d like, you can connect them to a media server and make a NAS out of them. Alternatively, you can use Windows’s Storage Spaces or a similar program, like UnRAID, and just turn the multiple drives into a big pool of storage with a single drive letter for easier access — though in this case, a drive failure might take down the storage pool entirely. Leaving the drives as individual drives is safer.

Insurance for the future

Again, this is a simple way to add storage: You find a good deal on a used drive, buy it, slot it in. Repeat and replace.

Fortunately, feral gangs of former IT support staff aren’t roaming the streets. You don’t have to “know a guy” to buy storage, yet. But even “overstock” sites are advertising sky-high prices for storage. If you’re the kind of person who keeps their eyes out for deals — a drive here, another there — a storage dock is insurance against a future that looks increasingly grim.

Buy Cenmate's $129 hard-drive docking station before an AI company buys up every hard drive on the planet