Comments on: Tip of the day: Build your own external hard drive

By: austin_o

austin_o — Sun, 23 Oct 2005 00:14:54 +0000

I have built 4 such units. Easy to do and costs less than a pre-built off the shelf unit.

By: chuck

chuck — Wed, 31 Dec 1969 17:00:00 +0000

Ed,

I created my own and did a little write up about it.

I love it, its a 200 gig external drive that I built for 100 bucks.

Take care,
Chuck

[Edited to make link clickable. - Ed]

By: Jason Gerend

Jason Gerend — Wed, 31 Dec 1969 17:00:00 +0000

Hi Ed, great tip, but one thing that I’ve noticed from doing this with a variety of enclosures and drives is that you can sometimes run into compatibility problems with older systems that do not ship with USB 2.0 support.

For example, my Dell PowerEdge server ships with USB 1.1 ports, and will blue-screen when I plug in a USB 2.0 drive enclosure. I added a USB 2.0 card and managed to get one of my two external drives to work, but the other still blue-screens. I might have better luck with a Maxtor or Western Digital external drive due to their compatibility testing… Sometimes you can work around this with a combo Firewire/USB drive enclosure (if you have Firewire ports), but these do cost more $$$

Anyway, great tip and blog!

Jason

By: Ed Bott

Ed Bott — Wed, 31 Dec 1969 17:00:00 +0000

Interesting observation, Jason. I also have a PowerEdge server, and I added a USB 2.0 card to it which has handled every external drive I’ve thrown at it. I would suspect the adapter card (or maybe the driver) in your case. If the USB 2.0 port is working correctly, it shouldn’t matter what external drive you throw at it.

By: Frank Schrader

Frank Schrader — Wed, 31 Dec 1969 17:00:00 +0000

This is a great tip. With a little shopping I came up with a price of .53 a GB which includes a good USB/Firewire metal enclosure–with a fan and cables, a 300GB name brand drive (and this even includes shipping).

By: Peter Ortner

Peter Ortner — Wed, 31 Dec 1969 17:00:00 +0000

I bought a 2.5″ enclosure a while ago, and stuffed an old Powerbook drive in it. The smaller size is much more portable, plus there’s no fan or external power supply. The case is extruded aluminium. Power is leeched from the USB via a second cable.

By: Walter66

Walter66 — Wed, 31 Dec 1969 17:00:00 +0000

I upgraded a laptop from 30 GB, 4200 rpm drive to 60 GB, 7200 rpm drive(wow, what a performance jump–new drive also has 16 MB cache). For $25 I got a USB powered aluminum case for the old drive and that is now the backup drive for my wife’s laptop where we store a drive image weekly, dumping the old after we verit\fy the new. I have effective 27 GB for pennies.

By: Is there a PC Doctor in the house?

Is there a PC Doctor in the house? — Wed, 31 Dec 1969 17:00:00 +0000

External hard drives – Ed Bott is correct

Good post today by Ed Bott on building your own external hard drive.
I particularly agree with this:
“A word of advice: Check the pictures and reviews for external enclosures separately. I’m willing to pay a little more to get qual…