I love accessories that work like fire extinguishers. Newer Technology’s USB Universal Drive Adapter is a perfect example. It sits around the office for days or weeks until the dramatic moment when you’re desperately grateful that you had the thing within reach.

The UDA is an endearingly ugly tangle of data and power cables that lets you turn any bare SATA or IDE storage mechanism into a mountable USB 2.0 drive. It almost doesn’t matter what kind it is. A notebook-sized hard drive mechanism, 3.5″ desktop mechanism, a DVD writer mechanism…if it’s got things to plug cables into, then the UDA is that set of cables.

And for $35 stinking dollars, you can afford to just buy the UDA and throw it in a desk drawer.

That’s where it was when I needed it last month. My MacBook acquired Sudden Shutdown Syndrome. It’s a tragically annoying problem in which at random moments, it forgets that it’s a working, dynamic piece of office/lifestyle equipment and tries to look and behave as much like a terra cotta brick as possible.

Off to the repair depot it went. But I certainly wasn’t going to send it away until I’d made a complete backup of its 320 gig internal drive. Ah. Bad news, there: it’d been a couple of weeks since the bloody thing had stayed functional long enough for a complete backup to be made!

No sweat. I just popped out the hard drive, hooked it up to the UDA, and in minutes I had it mounted on my iMac’s desktop. Cool.

And when I started getting rid of years of old computers, did I have to boot up each and every one of these old Mac and Windows machines to see if there was anything valuable on their drives? Cripes, the reason why I tossed the HP tower in the closet to begin with was because I couldn’t get any video from it!

No prob. Pull out the drive, plug in the UDA, mount the volume on my current machine’s desktop.

Newer has followed up on the UDA with a toaster-like version of the same concept: the Voyager series of docks for notebook and desktop-sized hard drive mechanisms. I use my UDA so frequently that I often leave a big spare 500 gig mechanism out on my desktop for use when space gets tight. With the Voyager, I can keep my desktop pretty by just sticking the mechanism in the Voyager’s slot. It sticks up like a hot, fresh Pop-Tart.

Look, it’s not just about keeping a smart-looking desk. The Voyager costs as much as $99 for the deluxe FireWire/USB edition but you’ll probably spend less time being terrified that you’re going to dislodge a ribbon cable during a write operation and permanently disfigure your data.

The hard drive toaster has three winning features, beyond its obvious appeal as a rescue station for functional drives trapped inside dysfunctional computers:

1) It allows you to buy new hard drives with zero overhead. If you’re constantly blowing through storage, it’s a damned cheap way to give an important video project 250 gigs of dedicated 7200 RPM working space that can be safely filed away after the invoices have been filed.

2) It’s a simple way to recover the value in the hard drive mechanisms that always seem to be floating around an active office. The last time I cleaned my office, I collected over a terabyte in old, unused drive mechanisms, refugees from past upgrades.

3) It looks awesome on your desk. No kidding. Now I look at other folks’ external drives with their smoked plastic cases and their indicator lights and I think “that thing might as well be wearing a frilly pink tea-party dress.” My mechanisms are raw and exposed, baby, out in the open and spinning at thousands of RPMs mere inches away from my fingers.