As I replaced computers over the years, I tended to yank out the old hard drives. If they had a decent amount of storage, I sometimes slapped them into new machines for backup storage.

But more often than not, I put the old drives into a cardboard box and forgot them.

Now Newer Technology Inc., a Woodstock company with a line of clever products aimed at both Macs and PCs, has come up with a device that enables pack rats like me to put old drives back into harness.

Newer Tech calls the $30 device the USB 2.0 Universal Drive Adapter, but maybe it should have dubbed it "The Lazarus Machine" or "The Reanimator."

It's simple to use: Dust off the old hard drive and plug in a cable linking it to the USB port in your computer. On larger drives, you'll need to plug in a cord to power up with household current. Smaller drives don't need the extra juice; they're powered by the USB.

The old hard drive, only moments before slumbering, will show up as an external drive on your computer. Drag and drop files at will.

Having experienced a major computer crash recently, I have become conscientious about creating backups of documents, photos and music files. So I moved some of those files onto an old 20-gig hard drive.

If you take a lot of photos, as I do, or even are a photo pro, old hard drives can be a handy, inexpensive way to store your files.

Newer Tech's device also showed me that some of my old drives had actually croaked, so I'll have to dispose of them or use them as doorstops.

The Universal Drive Adapter is available from Newer Tech's sister company, Macsales at macsales.com, and some smaller retailers. Macsales charges $40 to enshrine an old hard drive in an enclosure.

While I was tidying up a new hard drive on my old desktop and breaking in a new laptop, I also decided to check out a file transfer tool, the Tornado from Data Drive Thru Inc.

The Tornado makes it easy to move files between computers, in my case one with Windows XP and the other with Vista -- without installing software. This is a great tool to aid in migrating files rapidly to a new computer.

You plug the Tornado into the USB ports on the two Windows-based machines. In seconds a split screen appears, showing files on both PCs. Then, you can drag and drop files between the computers.

The Tornado is available for $60 plus shipping from www.thetornado.com.

DRIVE TIMES | You just couldn't part with that past-its-prime hard drive, could you? Well, now a $30 device gives it a new reason to live.