How to Build a Hard Drive Enclosure Kit for a Laptop
If you have upgraded your hard drive any number of times, you may have old hard drives lying around that you may have considered throwing away. You can preserve these old hard drives by building external hard-drive enclosures. This can be done for a fraction of the price of purchasing new external hard drives. Additionally, building an external hard-drive enclosure for an existing hard drive is an easy task that can be completed in just a few minutes.
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Instructions
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Determine what type of hard drive you have. If your hard drive is an older drive you will need to know what type of connections it needs. It will most likely use ATA or IDE connectors. See Resources for more details. Additionally, you may want to consider what type of connection you want to use for your external hard drive. For instance, most external hard drives connect to a computer via USB cable, while some hard drives utilize a firewire connection.
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Purchase an external hard-drive enclosure kit from a local, or online computer parts and supplies retailer. Set the jumper settings on the hard drive before you assemble the hard-drive enclosure. The jumper switches are located right next to the hard-drive data and power connectors. Refer to your hard-drive enclosure's users guide for the specific jumper settings required for the hard-drive enclosure.
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Place the hard drive into the hard-drive enclosure, and then connect the power and data cables to the rear of the hard drive. Fasten the hard drive to the enclosure with the screws provided with the enclosure kit. Assemble the rest of the enclosure kit in accordance with the assembly instructions it came with.
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Test the external hard drive by connecting it to your computer with a firewire, or USB cable to make sure the hard drive works.
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References
Resources
- Photo Credit hard drive image by Graham Lumsden from Fotolia.com
