WiebeTech's Notebook DriveDock (US$99) recently bailed me out of a jam. I was upgrading to a larger PowerBook hard drive and the former drive stopped responding. Enter the "Mac Recovery Kit for Notebook Drives," or just Notebook DriveDock for short, from WiebeTech.

This excellent little piece of hardware is contains all the components of a 2.5-inch hard drive enclosure, sans the actual enclosure part. A Notebook DriveDock comes in super handy when moving notebook drives about because you don't have to put an entire enclosure back together to being working with the drive. Simply remove the drive from your PowerBook ("simply" here is a relative term, mind you) then slide it into the Notebook DriveDock and plug it into any Firewire machine.

The Notebook DriveDock is built around the Oxford OXFW911 FireWire bridge and is bus-powered so you don't need an external power adapter. The updated version includes a rigid bottom plate to provide base and protection for drive electronics.

Once I installed my former drive in the NoteBook DriveDock it still wouldn't mount, so I installed the included license of Data Rescue X by Prosoft Engineering and a "Quick Scan" revealed that most of my files were still visible and recoverable - despite the fact that drive would not mount. Although I ran into a few problem files that produced errors, Data Rescue X recovered over 95 percent of the files I needed - a respectable recovery rate considering the alternatives.

Data Rescue X is different from other disk utilities like Norton, Disk Warrior and Drive 10 because it focuses on data recovery, instead of hard drive repair. According to ProSoft "Data Rescue will work in more cases, recover more effectively, and deliver your files in better condition than other utilities you may have tried in the past... (it) analyzes your entire hard drive looking for your data, then it meticulously re-assembles your files and stores them to a different location."

Amen to that one brother. The WiebeTech Notebook DriveDock and ProSoft's Data Rescue X are PowerPicks for sure!