Living a bare drive lifestyle

With the increasing demand for storage — video content and disk-based backups — professional Mac users often use hard disk mechanisms like floppies. Now storage vendors are enabling this bare drive workflow with a variety of disk adapters and protectors. On the desk and bookshelves in my office, I have stacks of drives in enclosures and others bare. But going bare is not without its risks: hard disk mechanisms aren’t floppies no matter how much we want them to be. When placed inside an enclosure or inside your desktop machine, the drive’s electronics are protected from coffee spills and depending on the drive, cooled by a fan. And even short drops can be terminal for a disk. I can see…