Building an External Hard Drive 1

[supertreat]

Hello,

I'm trying to build my own external hard drive and I was just wondering if anyone knew what to buy in terms of hard drives and cases so everything runs smoothly. Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks.

 

[rvnguy]

About the only critical thing that you must pay attention to are that if you intend to use an IDE HD that you buy an IDE enclosure. Or if a SATA HD that you then buy a SATA enclosure.

Most all 3.5 HD enclosures have a separate power supply while a few have the PS within the enclosure with the attending fan for cooling.

If you are looking for portability, the enclosures for a 2.5" HD are most all powered via the USB connection. This makes for less hardware to travel with.

The format of the HD depends totally on what OS(s) you intend to have access this drive. If all PC type Win2K, Linux or?(not MAC) then NTFS will be fine. If you intend for win9X, or MAC'a to have access to the files then you would need to use FAT32.

Hope this helps you

rvnguy
"I know everything..I just can't remember it all

 

[SeanAIX430]

Well there really isn't a whole lot of 'building' that goes on, you buy the drive, jumper it to master and screw it into the case and connect to cables. So it's not tons of fun or anything, and personally I recommend just buying one ready to go, there isn't significant savings unless you already have a large HD. I had an 80g drive laying around and bought a case from ebay for $20 and put it together and it was much larger and noisier than the nice Lacie one I bought.