I purchased this device some time ago after reading about it in a magazine. I thought the idea of an external USB DVD-ROM plus hard drive in one package was cool. Tonight I found a great use for this device – offline imaging of hard drives. With the USB DVD-ROM and an external hard drive built-in you have all you need to boot a system and image it. In my case I imaged a netbook, which of course has no optical drive. The Aegis NetDock is still available for sale. You can by it with no hard drive or with 250 or 500 GB drives already installed (installing your own drive is a piece of cake, though). It does only support 2.5″ notebook drives, however.