Advice on Connecting External HDD

You say "caddy". Not sure exactly what you mean by that. Maybe you mean "dock", where the drive is pretty much exposed, rather than enclosed.


There are "docks" that will accept 2 standard SATA drives simultaneously, with a single cable and a single power supply.

Here's an example:

VANTEC NexStar SuperSpeed NST-D400SU3-BK Plastic 2.5" & 3.5" Black USB3.0 & eSATA Dual Bay Hard Drive Dock - Newegg.com

These things normally have a power switch, so you could either turn it off when not in use or outright disconnect it and put it in the closet. Depends on how you are using the drives. If they are your primary backup where you'd use at least one of the two drives daily, I'd guess you'd want to leave it connected with the power off. And then turn it on when you wanted to backup. You'd have to keep track of which drive was which when you put them into the dock.

Or just use a single drive dock and rotate the drives into it as needed. I wouldn't think a dual drive dock would be required in most scenarios.

unless op is really short on HD space, i would really keep those 2 external drives separate, especially if used for backup. For example some badly timed power failure or nasty virus could knock all 3 drives out (internal and 2 connected back up drives). With 2 separate external drives one is connected to computer and one is safely stored, so even a disaster should leave you with one good drive and at least partial backup, if you rotate them properly. There are plenty of dual HDD enclosures, even in Raid configuration, if OP insists on such set up as well, but can't help with local sources, since i'm in us.