Gadgetory

if you have an old desktop or laptop lying around you also have an old hard drive that you could be using as an external hard drive all you need to do is remove that storage and put it in an enclosure together they make a pretty cheap external hard drive but before you go out and do that there are a few things you need to know if you pull your drive from a laptop it'll be a 2.5 inch drive that looks something like this if you pulled the internal drive out of a desktop it'll be a lot bigger a 3.5 inch drive that looks like this most people are going to be dealing with a SATA drive but if your drive came from an older machine from before 2003 it'll be a pay to drive so just keep that in mind now that you know what kind of drive you have it's time to start thinking about the enclosures so there are a few things you'll want to look for first of all make sure you're picking the right size for your drive a 2.5 inch enclosure looks like this and in enclosure for a 3.5 inch drive looks something like this one difference that you'll notice with this one is that it'll come with an AC adapter which makes it a little bulkier and not so good for portability next you'll want to pick your external interface that determines what kind of connection you'll use to hook up your drive in most cases you'll go with a USB 2.0 connection because any computer can connect with that but if your computer can take USB 3.0 or firewire go with that those are faster connections now that you have those details out of the way the last thing to consider is what the enclosure is made out of when you're shopping for enclosures you'll notice that they come in aluminum or plastic always go with aluminum it'll keep your drive a lot cooler okay once you have your enclosure in hand all that's left to do is put it together and that's really simple I'll grab my hard drive and put these two connectors together now I'll take this part put it back in the enclosure and screw it in with the provided screws and the provided screwdriver give it a good twist and my external hard drive is complete now this enclosure came with this court it has mini USB on one side and two USB connectors on the other reason being that this drive needs more power than normal USB devices so I'll put my mini USB in here connect both of these USB cords to my laptop and there it is my computer recognized it just like it would any other drive so now I can open it up browse some really old files on here or I can reformat it and start with a clean slate if you have any questions during this process please let me know on Twitter and check out the accompanying blog for more tips for cnet.com I'm Sharon Vaknin