Build your own External Hard Drive

Build your own External Hard Drive

I hope this will be Helpful to new users / members.

rb:
Materials needed:

External HD enclosure kit ( I got mine from eBay $ 12.50)



a good brand HD (Sata or IDE) (I got a WD Blue 500gb for $39.99 from NewEgg)
Use the proper enclosure case for either Sata or IDE HD.


Open the new Ext enclosure carefully. Some have screws holding the 2 ends onto
the aluminum case. The one I just used had small plastic push tabs, that can break easily.


Connect the Data & Power cables properly to the HD. Most are coded so they can only be
inserted one way.


Slide the HD & cabled end assembly back into the case. Attach the ends to the case.
Next connect the power supply cord to the Ext case.

Then the USB cable.



Connect the power supply to your standard home electrical source.

rb:
Connect the USB cable to a USB port on your computer, turn on the switch on the EXT case.


Now Windows should find the new hardware & install the drivers for it.

Windows may give you a prompt that this HD may need to be Initialized (especially if it is a new Raw HD).


Follow the prompts if you need to Initialize your new raw HD.




rb:


If windows does not automatically asign a drive letter to your new Ext HD, then you will need to go
into Disk Management to asign it a drive letter.

rb:

Enjoy the use of your External Hard Drive

Epic Kits, I use those on a daily basis. Very nice when a hard drive dies as well... pop it in and run diagnostics.

DocBrown said:

Build your own External Hard Drive

Enjoy the use of your External Hard Drive

Click to expand...

These things are awesome I've used them almost as long as I've had a computer.... My first computer was purchased in 94 or 95, I forget. I've got one for a 400g IDE and two for SATA 2.x. I'm not changing my thinking for a while...

I use an external Dock for post portable hard drive uses these days

USB2 and eSATA;
Newegg.com - Thermaltake BlacX ST0005U External Hard Drive SATA Enclosure Docking Station 2.5” & 3.5” USB 2.0 & eSATA

I love mine. I have 2 Rosewill enclosures with 1T Samsung Spinpoints. They are great.

Well written and helpful (and cheap to accomplish!). I will say that there should be more pink dancing elephants. I do take exception to that. Please bear this in mind for your next tutorial.



James

Doc, Nicely written article! I always appreciate the effort that goes into something like that. It takes a lot of work.

FYI, recently I went with an off-the-shelf dual-HD solution called BlacXduet from Thermaltake. Stuff your own SATA drives in. Not as pretty, but you can swap out quickly. eSATA or USB connection. About $58 from Best Buy.

I have been checking on external hard drives and just about all come with a 1yr warranty. I like the idea of getting a good HDD with 5yr warranty and sticking it in an enclosure. I am still looking for an enclosure with USB3.0/2.0 and a SATA III interface. Found a few with USB3.0 but with SATA II interface. They state SATA III compatible but run at SATA II speeds. Not in a hurry so will wait for the higher specs.

Jim

soho1 said:

Doc, Nicely written article! I always appreciate the effort that goes into something like that. It takes a lot of work.

FYI, recently I went with an off-the-shelf dual-HD solution called BlacXduet from Thermaltake. Stuff your own SATA drives in. Not as pretty, but you can swap out quickly. eSATA or USB connection. About $58 from Best Buy.

Click to expand...

You can also get those that except both 3.5 and 2.5 I'm not sure if the one shown does but thought I'd mention it anyways.
One of the cool things is the hot swap feature.

Also very well written and attached photo's Doc should help out some members. +1 on that.
Fabe

Phoneman, I have sata 6 connectors in my computer. I also have a sata 6 HD and a sata 3 HD. The only way to tell the difference is through benchmarks, and that is even minimal. Truth is there is no mechanical drive that can max out sata3 capabilities much less sata6. and the enclosures usually come with a 1 yr warranty, the HD comes with extended warranties.
As far as performance of sata 3 vs. sata6.
WD1002FAEX sata6-internal 1TB

Seagate sata3-500GB internal

Samsung sata3- external esata

Thanks everbody for the comments & suggested ideas, appreciated.




I started this thread because I have seen so many new members having problems with MFG boxed Ext HD units. So, I thought let's show them one of the simplist & inexpensive ways to do an EXT HD

rb:


I have been looking at some of the Dual HD docking units, & I'll probably get one, since I do a lot of HD testing & swapping.






In the past, I have used the USB Tri-Head adapter for quick testing & swapping.





rb:

DocBrown said:

Thanks everbody for the comments & suggested ideas, appreciated.




I have been looking at some of the Dual HD docking units, & I'll probably get one, since I do a lot of HD testing & swapping.

View attachment 131415

Click to expand...

Now that's of great interest to me. It appears that not only can you hot swap 2 drives simultaneously, but also duplicate. And a decent price. I wonder if it's of durable construction. I'll be interested to hear how that goes. Thanks for your work.

James

I got this Rosewill USB SATA Dock for FREE when I bought the WD Green HD

Ext USB IDE HD

I thought I would update this thread, as I have seen several members wanting to put older IDE Desktop HD's in External Enclosures to get to some of their old files, etc.



This works very much like the info in the first post here. But the IDE uses a little bit different Data & Power connectors.



Most important with an IDE HD is to determine the correct setting for a Master HD, not a Slave drive, or CS ( Cable Select).



Make sure the little plastic Jumper is positioned on the proper small jumper pins on the IDE HD.



Connect the 40pin ribbon Data cable correctly & the 4pin Molex power cable. Slide the completed unit into the enclosure & secure with the proper screws, etc.



Now you can connect the EXT unit power supply cable, then the USB cable. Finally connect the USB cable other end to a good USB port on your computer. Power up the Ext unit and watch for windows to recognize it & install the driver for it.



Hopefully if this IDE HD was from a previous Desktop, it was already formatted with either NTFS or FAT32 file systems, and it will be easily recognized.

rb:

If it is an unformatted IDE HD, just follow the similar steps in post #1 to initalize & format it.

Hope this was helpful and you get good use from your Ext HD enclosure unit.

I prefer to use eSATA for SATA drives instead of USB 2.0 or 3.0 on newer machines. eSATA is an external connection that connects directly to the SATA bus of your motherboard. There are lots of enclosures that support eSATA and an eSATA port for your computer is simply an eSATA connector with a cable that attaches to one of the available SATA ports of your motherboard. Adding eSATA to a laptop isn't as easy but there are eSATA PC cards available (example). If you have some computers with eSATA and some that only support USB, you can use the enclosure with either as the enclosure supports both so you can use a USB cable to attach to one computer then an eSATA cable to connect to a different computer (not at the same time).

I like my hot swap internal mounts all Sata connections.

linnemeyerhere said:

I like my hot swap internal mounts all Sata connections.View attachment 153488

Click to expand...

Yes, Alan

Hot swap racks are another great way Especially if your computer tower has enough available bays

Both SATA & IDE are available

Your mobo also will need tons of sata ports and maybe some legacy to get it done. My mobo and two Sata / eSata PCIe cards powers all 13 sata devices/eSata ports.....wow and I needed to order IDE opticals to get it done. USB3 will take over where eSata ruled before. Watch for USB3 external inclosure's to become the norm soon.

DocBrown said:

Thanks everbody for the comments & suggested ideas, appreciated.




I started this thread because I have seen so many new members having problems with MFG boxed Ext HD units. So, I thought let's show them one of the simplist & inexpensive ways to do an EXT HD

rb:

In the past, I have used the USB Tri-Head adapter for quick testing & swapping.


View attachment 131412


rb:

Click to expand...

Hi.
I use one of those tri head adapters with a WD green drive removed from a Sky HD box (I cancelled my subscription ) I cut up the plastic side vents of the box and made a holder for the drive. After plugging in & re-formatting it was recognised straight away and allocated drive letter "I" on my system. I do all my backups to that and another external drive (can't be to careful)

linnemeyerhere said:

Your mobo also will need tons of sata ports and maybe some legacy to get it done. My mobo and two Sata / eSata PCIe cards powers all 13 sata devices/eSata ports.....wow and I needed to order IDE opticals to get it done. USB3 will take over where eSata ruled before. Watch for USB3 external inclosure's to become the norm soon.

Click to expand...

I'm curious about your statement regarding USB3 and eSata. While, in theory, USB3 is faster than Sata, I doubt you will see an increase in xfer speed from an external drive since the drive itself can't xfer data fast enough to saturate the Sata bus, let alone achieve the theoretical speed of 5G for USB3. Perhaps with an SSD as the external drive you would see a benefit. USB3 may prove to be more popular than eSata though, when mass produced computers all come with USB3 ports. Unfortunately for eSata, it never became particularly widespread.