I must admit, I was wondering about getting a hard disk docking station (assuming that the hard disk isn't the component responsible for my laptop failing). While I try to make sure I have multiple copies of all my application data (Word files, Excel files, etc.), I'm sure I've probably squirrelled something I'll later miss in an obscure directory, which hasn't been backed up, and it would be nice to have some way of accessing it when I realise I need it.
By the way, my previous** laptop failed, and though I was sent a replacement hard disk as part of my service agreement, I think the failure lay elsewhere, as I never got the thing running again. However, the manufacturer insisted that I send my old hard disk to them, even providing a padded box for the purpose. I simply forgot to do it - what would they do? refuse to sell me another machine? - because the disk contained commercially sensitive data. (As I'd gone to the trouble of setting up a limited company - the penalties for letting the customer's data get out into the wider world were onerous - I wasn't going to let the laptop maker's outsourced repair company see any of it.)
In fact, thinking about it, when that old laptop failed, I'd just spent time moving emails from the email provider's central repository - in those far distant days, you weren't given much online storage - and hadn't saved them elsewhere, so I lost a lot of emails. They may still be on that very old disk drive....
** - This was a long time ago: I spent years with only a desktop PC.
