How to Make Your Own External Hard Drive.

The best way to save a lot of money on an external harddrive is to make your own! Making your own external hard drive couldn't be any easier and by doing so you could be saving a lot of money. To make your own external hard drive, you only need three things. They are:

• A Hard Drive Enclosure
• A USB Cable(Most of the time hard drive enclosures come with USB cables)
• A New or Used Hard Drive.

Here are the steps to making your own external hard drive:

Step 1 - Make a decision on how much storage capacity you want your external hard drive to have. Do you want a 50GB external hard drive, or a 500GB one? The more storage capacity you need, the more you'll end up paying for the hard drive.

Step 2 - Buy a hard drive that has the storage capacity you need. The best prices for hard drives can be found on eBay or Amazon.com. What you need to buy is an internal hard drive. Usually, you would buy an internal hard drive and install it inside your computer. But since you are making your own external hard drive, you are going to be putting the hard drive into a hard drive enclosure.

Step 3 - Buy a hard drive enclosure. It's important to make sure that your hard drive will fit into the enclosure. Hard drives come in 2 different sizes: 3.5", and 2.5". A 3.5" hard drive is the standard for regular desktop computers. 2.5" hard drives are the standard for Laptop computers, and are smaller than 3.5" hard drives. If you're not sure what size your hard drive is, the size should be displayed somewhere on the box, or on the hard drive itself. If you have a 3.5" hard drive, you need to buy a hard drive enclosure for 3.5" hard drives. If you have a 2.5" in hard drive (a laptop hard drive), then you need to buy an enclosure for 2.5" hard drives. The enclosure should come packaged with a USB cable and a power supply cable. Depending on your computer, you may or may not need the power supply cable. You can get really great prices on hard drive enclosures on eBay. Most hard drive enclosures on eBay cost under $15.00.

Amazon.com has good prices on hard drive enclosures, but they cost a little more than the ones you would find on ebay.

Click here to buy hard drive enclsoures from Amazon.com

Step 4 - The final step is to put them all together, which only takes a minute or two. Because there are so many different hard drive enclourses for sale, it's impossible to give you specific directions on how to install your hard drive into the enclsoure. You're hard drive enclosure should come with instructions on how to install your hard drive in it. More than likely though, your hard drive should slide right into the enclosure. Then you can plug in the USB Cord, and connect it to the USB Port on your computer. You don't need to install any software because it's already installed on Windows XP & Vista. Turn on the hard drive, and there you have it! You're own external hard drive that you made yourself! Now that wasn't too hard, huh?

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