USB 3.0 to esata

An eSata docking station would do the trick.

Newegg.com - Thermaltake BlacX ST0005U External Hard Drive SATA Enclosure Docking Station 2.5” & 3.5” USB 2.0 & eSATA

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16817173042

Both options are valid. Only advantage of eSata is the faster speed.

Perhaps this will help

Tomtom111 said:

And on a side note, the docks people are linking, are USB 2 and esata ports- I need an adapter of USB 3 (female) to esata (male).
Finally, the hard drive that has USB 3 would only be able to get USB 3 speeds, even if I did get the correct adapter because the hard rive was designed with USB 3, not esata, right?

Let's clear this up:

First, what is in your external hdd is basically a computer internal HDD (the 2.5" kind anyway, the ones you find in laptops). It does interface to the world with SATA and sata power connectors just as any other internal HDD. Its specs vary (but usually tend to be on par with laptop HDDs, fancy ones have HDDs that would be good as desktop internal drives as well), but the speed bottleneck is usually the casing's ports which more often than not cannot really compete with the HDD's own SATA (only estata and thundersomething have any chance against SATA).

Then you can place this naked HDD in a case, that contains the circuitry that turns that SATA + sata power into USB 2 or 3 or even esata or firewire and thundersomething (for mac) depending on model.

The dock is just a open-topped HDD case, it connects to the HDD with SATA and sata power, and connects to the computer with whatever ports they decide to put.
Their main good point is that you can hot-swap drives in a few seconds, main drawback is that they are open-topped, so the HDD is half-naked (and exposed to damage or shorts or whatever).
Good for techs, but not good for consumers.

As a side note, the USB 3.0 adapter I told you before had a tendency to get stuck in its expresscard slot. To get it out to examine it the first time I had to loosen a bit the screws in that side of the guy's laptop, shake the machine a bit and then pull it out by hand after I pressed it in and waited the springs to push it out like other expresscards.
Assuming it wasn't a failure of the expresscard slot's springs I personally consider this a feature, as it should stay put under the plug-unplug the USB and other movements a laptop is supposed to endure.