External Hard Drives

[NAiLs]

Can I take my Western Digital HDD enclosure and toss in a new drive if I wish, or will this be too much of a PITA? How do those external drive kits work where you buy the enclosure and the drive? Are those all hooked up by USB also?

I'm just wondering 'cause I wouldn't mind more storage for my laptop. Having a 80GB external HDD that has 20GB free on it yet and a 60GB internal drive on the laptop with 5GB free sucks! Mind you, I had just whiped both of these drives a month ago!

Thanks!

-Brian

[infinitevalence]

Yes you should be able to do that, most of the time its just a simple swap, put one drive into the case after takeing the other out. The worst case is that it does not work.

[Pooreone]

I swap out hard drives in mine all the time. You can browse a collection of them here:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList.asp?Submit=GO&Range=1&bop=and&description=external+encloser&InnerCata=92

This is the one I have and it works great:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16817145745

[smartadze]

I'd have to say that the 3.5" enclosures have become obsolete. They use a normal desktop-size hard drive (which are cheap, I admit) but are big, heavy, and require a seperate power adapter plugged into an AC outlet.

Now that 2.5" notebook drives have gotten a lot cheaper, the 2.5" external enclosures are the way to go. They are way smaller than the size implies, and are powered from the USB2 port. Better yet, because they don't need a separate AC adapter, the 2.5" enclosures cost a lot less then the 3.5". I like this one a lot, and it's $8.99 with free shipping!

http://www.pcmicrostore.com/PartDetail. ... p:10501713

Get a bigger drive for your notebook, and put the old one from the notebook in your enclosure. You can get a 2.5" 60GB for $85 or so, and an 80 for around $100. Try the 2.5" external, and you'll never go back.

[NAiLs]

Well, I've got a 60GB internal now, but it just isn't cuttin' it. I wouldn't mind even having a drive aray that is networked like such:

http://www.bestbuy.com/site/olspage.jsp ... 4432781383

That was the only animal I could find like that. If it were locally attached it would be even better though. I don't have a problem plugging in something for power assuming I buy a large drive, such as a 300GB or 500GB. The drives stay at home anyway. I was thinking about those 2.5" ones, but couldn't grasp the price on them.... too pricey for me right now.

[kenc51]

That's a nice NAS box....Do you need networked storage???
The only reason for that is if there is a bunch of pc's @ home and you want to share will ALL @ the same time.....

If it's only goig to be used by yourself, then get a standard drive caddie!
smartadze mentioned laptop drives, which are great (powered from USB and small & light to carry) but if your aim is only to use external storage for home, go with a standard HDD and caddy....You will need an external power adaptor (comes with caddy)... but you can stick in a ~200GB dive and you won't have to worry about storage for a good while!

[NAiLs]

Any idea who makes a storage caddy for local drives? Doesn't need to be fancy, but to house two or three drives would be sweet. I don't NEED it to be networked, but it wouldn't hurt me if that is all I had a choice for. I honestly would prefer it to be a local device.

If I upgrade my desktop, I will have a 120GB and a 180GB that I could throw in there, but I have no problem going out and buying a 200GB+ drive since they're cheap enough.

[smartadze]

If you already have 2 drives and want them networked, pick up a cheap motherboard/cpu combo ($69 this week at Fry's for retail Sempron 2800 + MB) or even a used MB/cpu/ram and vid card and RAID the drives. Most current MBs feature a LAN port and some sort of RAID controller, or if not just run them as IDE 1 and 2.

You don't need anything current in the way of components, and Win98 works fine. Put the components in a cardboard box for that matter. We found that a dedicated, always-on slave computer made from laying-around parts was cheaper than a network enclosure, featured RAID, and all-around worked better. Converts to a server if you need it, too.

[NAiLs]

I don't need them networked. Would be nice, but honestly I would rather have local. I already have two machines at home that would serve perfect as a server, One being a P3 800 and the other being an Athlon XP 3200+. When I get my own house I'll probably setup a file server.

I've only seen the networked drive storage caddy's, just curious who makes ones for a local PC? 3.5" obviously.