How do I... Build your own external hard drive enclosure?

How do I… Build your own external hard drive enclosure?

By greg shultz January 16, 2008, 9:55 AM PST

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How do I… Build your own external hard drive enclosure?

Choose an enclosure

Are you in need of a large external hard drive to use for storing your music collection or backing up your data? As you know, you can go to just about any retail outlet that carries computer components and purchase a large external hard drive. However, if you’re the kind of person who prefers the do it yourself approach, you can easily put together your own external hard drive.

In this gallery, I’ll show you how to build an external hard drive.

Choosing

Once you begin looking, you’ll quickly discover that there are a bewildering number of external enclosures to choose from and each one comes with a variety of features. Of course, there are lots of different enclosure case designs — some are boxy, some are curvy, some are colored, and some are plain aluminum. Some enclosures are designed to house 2.5-inch drives but most are designed to house 3.5-inch drives. Most enclosures are designed to accommodate IDE drives although some are designed to accommodate SATA drives. The majority of enclosures come with a USB 2.0 connection interface, while some come with both USB 2.0 and FireWire. If the enclosure supports SATA drives, it will have a SATA connection interface and may even have a USB 2.0 or FireWire as well.

Almost all external enclosures are made of aluminum and the entire unit is designed to act as a big heat sink. However, other enclosures are made of composite plastic and come with their own fan to ensure that the hard drive stays cool.

Stick with a reputable merchandiser, seek out reviews, and look for the features that you need, and you should be OK.

Assembly

While looking for hard disks, I came across this 320GB Western Digital Caviar SE at NewEgg.com for $89.99. Because I’ve had good experiences with Western Digital Caviar drives in the past, the 320 GB size fit my needs, and it was a good price, I decided that this drive would fit the bill. (The total cost of the parts for my custom built external drive came to $127.98 plus shipping.)

Hard drive configuration

Like most hard drive manufacturers these days, Western Digital puts a diagram on the drive that shows the jumper settings for the various drive configurations. As you can see, by default the drive comes configured for the Cable Select setting with the jumper on pins 1 and 2. However, the manual for the Venus enclosure recommends using the Master or Single setting as you can see from the diagram, to configure this drive to the Master or Single setting, you need to remove the jumper.

Hard drive configuration

Here you can see the jumper on pins 1 and 2 for the Cable Select setting.

Hard drive configuration

Using a pair of tweezers, you can easily remove the jumper.

Hard drive configuration

Here you can see all the pins without any jumpers. The drive is now configured to the Master or Single setting.

Mounting

With the tray in place, you can secure it to the enclosure by tightening the two screws on the rear.

By greg shultz

My first computer was a Kaypro 16 \"luggable\" running MS-DOS 2.11 which I obtained while studying computer science in 1986. After two years, I discovered that I had a knack for writing documentation and shifted my focus over to technical writing.

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