I have a 300 GB hard drive, internal, and I'm trying to understand the concept of external enclosures: if I get a 3.5" ext. enclosure can I place this HDD inside it and basically create an external HDD?
yes, of course you can, as long as it is an IDE hard drive, SATA will not work with external enclosures. I have one and I put one of my old hard drives in there from a computer i had about 8 years ago to get the files off it, works great.
I had a client whose Laptop was s-l-o-w, it was pretty new and had okay spec's so I wasn't sure at first... Anyway his little 2.5" harddisk was pathetic - it was 4500RPM w/ 2MB cache. I replaced it with 80GB @ 5400RPM w/ 8MB for hardly any money (the truly expensive 2.5" are 7200RPM). Point is, I had this crappy little 40GB harddisk that broke no speed records... so I bought a Vantec enclosure for, get this, $20 bucks! Beautiful: including USB cable, little leather pouch, everything :^) Now I can carry around ~50 2-hour movies, right in my pocket... So yes, with USB 2.0 being 'everywhere' for coupla years now, these external drives are great! I didn't realize it was so... inexpensive. And easy ;^) Regards
I have been looking at one of these enclosures from safecom. It will take either SATA or IDE Hard drive which is good, as I need one for a spare 80 gig IDE drive I have in the desk drawer, but want to be able to upgrade later to a bigger SATA drive as soon as one finds its way into my grubby paws. It seems to be USB2 and Firewire compatible so looks to be a good investment. Details here : http://safecom.cn/code/sub/category.asp?prdid=191&subcatid=13# I've found it for sale in various places at around £23 in the U.K. so seems a good buy to me. I hope this helps.
