Portable, Affordable Hard Drives

This post is dedicated to my friend SarahMac who gave me the inspiration to blog about it.

The jump drive is one of my generations best tools and yet it is obsolete. For many of us a boost in storage is what we need for our massive amounts of media. So the solution is to run out a get a portable hard drive. However do you really want to go fork over 50 bucks for one?

For me, I find making my own is a simpler solution.

Step one:

Analyse how much storage you need. For alot of us, 250 gigs is probably enough, more than enough to move over pictures, music and videos. (Taking into account that these tend to be our largest files and if you wanted to move the contents of your ipod over to your hard drive you could only fill up at max what 160 gigs of the 250 we talked about). So knowing what you need is important, because the more storage you want, the more you will be paying.

Step two:

Assemble the parts. This is pretty simple, you need a case and a hard drive. Lets deal with the drive first. The standard portable hard drive (the kind that is just usb plug and play from the store) is usually a 2.5" drive. This is because of a smaller form factor (compared to a 3.5" drive) and also because of the power requirements on the drive. In the old days we used to be able to purchase IDE drives, but now the standard has moved to SATA. What does that mean? Well to spare you the techno jumble, its how the drive fits into the computer, and the ammount of data the drive can send up or down. IDE drives are old and SATA drives are new so newer is better.

Anyway we have a drive type now, a 2.5" SATA hard drive. Now we need a case. This is also really simple, because you can find a hard drive case that fits a 2.5" SATA hard drive.

Here are two links (on ebay) to a drive and a case:

--250 gig hard drive
 http://cgi.ebay.com/Seagate-250GB-SATA-5400RPM-2-5-Laptop-Hard-Drive-Tested-/280534359887?cmd=ViewItem&pt=LH_DefaultDomain_0&hash=item4151269f4f#ht_2547wt_1137

--Case
http://cgi.ebay.com/2-5-USB-2-0-SATA-HARD-DISK-DRIVE-HDD-CASE-ENCLOSURE-/220540926663?cmd=ViewItem&pt=PCC_Drives_Storage_Internal&hash=item3359437ac7#ht_3373wt_1027

All together thats about 32 bucks (you can find deals).

Now all you have to do is put the parts together and boom there you go. Here are some pictures of mine to show you how easy it is:

The Case:

here is the case with included usb cables

the inside of the case with the drive connections
















the drive top and bottom

putting it together, green side down and be careful and take your time. Its easy to break the pins if your too rough.

and there you have it, the finished product. just plug and play and your ready to go!











Its just that simple! I like this because I can make use of drive I get from computers past. Also It sure beats buying one eh?

Got questions comments or concerns? Want more help with something or got a suggestion for my next blog, email me at devangj031@gmail.com

Cheers

--Devang