Easy Hard Drive Enclosure Guide

This easy guide will show you how to turn an old hard drive into a useful and portable external drive.

Do you have any old hard drives lying around and gathering dust? Do you need to recover your data from any old computers? If you answered yes to either of those questions, then chances are good that you've thought about using your old drive as an external hard drive.

Fortunately, building an external hard drive is an easy task. Since you already have the hard drive, all you need is an enclosure, and less than a half hour of your time.

Some benefits to using an external hard drive enclosure are:

• Recovery of the data from an old broken or out of service computer.
• Additional storage for your documents, photos, media files, and backup your important data. 
• Saving money by reusing old hardware.
• Swapping and sharing data and files between computers.
• The aluminum casing of enclosures delivers excellent heat dissipation and provides tough, reliable hard drive protection.

Choosing a Hard Drive Enclosure

Hard drive enclosures are a common item these days and can be purchased for under $40 at iomagic.com.  However, before you go shopping, you'll want to figure out what type of enclosure you're going to need.

There are a few important factors that you'll want to take into consideration when looking for a hard drive enclosure to buy. To begin with, what is the physical size of the hard drive that you are planning on using — is it a 2.5 inch or 3.5-inch drive? What type of interface does your old hard drive have, is it IDE or SATA? Fortunately, all of the 3.5” Hard Drive Enclosures at I/OMagic support both SATA and IDE hard drives.

Next, you should consider data transfer speed; the current standard connector for enclosures is USB 3.0 which will provide you with the fastest speeds. However, if you are just recovering data once, and transfer speed isn’t important to you, buying a USB 2.0 hard drive enclosure should save you a few bucks.

Configuring the Hard Drive

All I/OMagic hard drive enclosure kids include all the necessary components to assemble your external drive.  Simply open the enclosure and then slide the tray out of the enclosure. With the drive tray out of the enclosure, you can connect the hard drive to either the IDE or SATA connectors. Then simply plug in the power connector to your hard drive. You'll then fasten the drive to the tray using the included screws. With the drive securely anchored in the tray, you should slide the tray back into the enclosure. As you do so, you may need to gently tuck the cables under the edge of the case. Then, all you need to do is refasten the tray to the enclosure using the provided screws. 

Connecting the drive

Once you've assembled the hard drive enclosure, you can connect it to your computer. To begin, make sure that the enclosure's switch is set to the off position. Next, connect the USB cable to the back of your computer and to the back of the enclosure. Then connect the power cable to the back of enclosure and plug it into an outlet. With all the connections made, all you have to do is flip on the switch. Most computers will instantly recognize your new external drive and you should be able to use it right away. That’s it, you now have a brand new external storage system for extra data storage or as a new backup destination!