Here's an interesting concept by CLAIRE + LÉA, a Paris/Zurich-based design studio. Their Hard Drive is mounted to a spring-loaded slider, allowing it to clamp to your desktop.
This frees up space, while providing access to just the crucial bits: The power switch, the LED that lets you know it's on, and the USB port.
Is it worth the added cost/potential breakage of the spring-loaded mechanism and the wiring stress? We'd have to assume the market says no, as the design never reached production. Nevertheless I like the thinking, from a UX point of view.
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Turn once in your chair and your knee would take it out and set you back $300 or so. No reason for this.
Video editors and others who work with large files need separate drives around all the time. If it's clamped solidly at the back on a deep enough desk, the risk of knocking it off seems no worse than knocking over your coffee cup on to your keyboard or other types of desk mishaps than might affect a drive. Seems like a reasonable an alternative to having a separate shelf, or an under the desk drive mount.
An issue with clamping like this is the holding force is variable depending on the thickness of the desktop. It also only works on minimalist-style desktops.
Maybe if it were horizontal, but who needs to "access" a HD that much anyway? If I really wanted to use this I'd end up turning it around so it was flipped up and then set it on the side of the desk... Honestly, just not a good idea. It's odd because having it clamped to the desk implies a certain permanence, so it's not for just a few hours or something, it's for YOUR desk. And if that is the case then it makes much more sense to have some sort of design for the top of the desk but towards the back.
This also solves the problem of not accidentally knocking your hard drive on the floor routinely because you are not stressed out enough.
It looks cool and desks are certainly cluttered, but you still need a wire trailing to it and it won't work on standard office desks that have a frames underneath, legs at the corners and privacy partitions on the edges.
unplugging the HDD or SSD mid writing might corrupt your data and result in data loss. I like the design of it, but would also see it being knocked off quite easily. What I would like to see is a flat clamping style where the HDD/SSD is flipped 90 degrees and sit flat below or on top of the desk. This would be more slim and less likely to be knocked off.