Installing Snow Leopard turned out to be kind of a fiasco for me, but having this USB-Sata Hard Drive Dock made life a little easier. It takes up to 2 Sata drives at a time, either laptop or desktop.

So, how did I use it to help with my Snow Leopard problems?

Well, first is backup. I always keep spare drives around, so I snapped a 500GB hard drive in the unit to backup my MacOS install (no, I dont do regular backups, I know its criminal).

After I had updated my MacBook’s SSD Drive in-place, I ran into troubles and it wouldn’t boot.

So I snapped the 500GB backup back in, stuck my MacBook’s OEM drive in the MacBook, and did a fresh snow leopard install, restoring my old stuff from the backup.

When I had worked out my issues and was sure my install was solid, I just popped my SSD back in the dock and cloned the install with SuperDuper.

It is so much easier then climbing into a case to swap SATA cables – which you cant even do with a MacBook, since it has no external SATA ports anyway.

Even when you’re not trouble shooting, the dock can serve as external storage for whatever you would ever need external storage for.

The one problem is with Apple’s OEM MacBook drives – they have these infuriating little Torx screws on the edges that make the drives impossible to dock, and removing them isn’t easy.

I’m not blaming the dock on that one though – that’s just Apple being Apple.