What's the opposite of 'Enclosure'?
What's the opposite of an enclosure? Seems there isn't a direct antonym for the word, following an exhaustive search of the net (well, after two queries I was exhausted). We'd better try to describe what we mean, instead.
Imagine an external hard drive enclosure, but without a top, or a bottom, or sides. So just the bridging hardware, basically. Got it? Wasn't so hard to describe after all.
Yes, today we have a device that allows us to connect hard drives up externally, when they're actually designed for internal use. Stay with us, there's more. We know that such devices have been around for a while now. IDE-to-USB converters have been available for as long as fully-fledged external enclosures have; they're all built on the same bridging technology, after all. What makes this bridging device different is that it's got two bridges on it. Two external hard drives on two different interfaces.
To the techie, it's extremely handy to be able to hook up (almost) any hard drive to a PC for testing, backup, recovery and so on. A device such as the one we have on test today - the Magic Bridge, by a company called SOHOUSB - is therefore itself a rather handy item in the techie toolkit. But is it an essential item? Let's find out.
