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"   Think of your computer&amp;#039;s hard drive as the closet of your PC. When you first build your house, you try to design in enough closet space to hold all the stuff you own and plan out a little extra storage for the new things you&amp;#039;ll acquire in the future. Inevitably, your closets become overstuffed with tennis rackets, board games, coats, towels and other objects you just can&amp;#039;t part with. The same is true of your computer. The various programs, pictures, digital music and movies that accumulate can fill your computer&amp;#039;s hard drive to the bursting point. Luckily, it&amp;#039;s much easier to build an addition for your computer than it is for your home. Building your own external hard drive is a 5-minute job that can be done without opening up your PC&amp;#039;s case. By buying an internal drive and an enclosure to put it in, you save money. Assembling your own drive also gives you more flexibility to choose the connections, capacity and design that suit your needs. Plus, it is the simplest way to get the drives from your previous computers plugged into and playing nicely with a new machine. How much cheaper can a build-your-own drive be? Prices fluctuate, but bargains are plentiful if you look around. We found an internal Seagate 200GB hard drive for only $50 (after manufacturer&amp;#039;s rebate) from Outpost.com and a 3.5-in. USB 2.0 External IDE hard-drive case for $33 at www.xpcgear.com. (Total cost: $83.) Compare that to a prebuilt Maxtor OneTouch II 200GB External USB 2.0/FireWire hard drive that was $230 at CompUSA. That&amp;#039;s a $147 difference. Before you go shopping for components, however, you&amp;#039;ll need to know your drives, enclosures and connections. Basically, there are three physical sizes of internal drives to consider: laptop (1.8 in., 2.5 in.) and desktop (3.5 in.). Laptop hard drives are more expensive, but smaller and lighter, and some can draw power through a USB cable. Desktop drives are available with much higher capacities (up to 500GB) but must have an external power source. Hard drives are available in two basic flavors: SATA (serial advanced technology attachment) and IDE (integrated drive electronics). IDE drives use a 40-pin connection (look for the wide, flat cable). They are the more common drive format and tend to be cheaper. In the past few years, drives using a faster, simpler SATA connection have come to market. SATA drives tend toward higher capacities and transfer data at six times the speed of IDE drives. Remember that data transfer is only as fast as the slowest connection, so the higher speed of a SATA drive is wasted if the data is handed off to a USB 2.0 cable that moves bits at one-sixth the speed. An aluminum enclosure will act as a heat sink to keep the drive cool. If you decide on a plastic case, get one with a fan. Make sure the cables inside the enclosure you buy match the connections on the back of your drive. Likewise, make sure the output cables from the enclosure match the data inputs on your PC. The most common input on modern PCs is USB 2.0 (with a transfer rate of 480 megabits per second), but some computers may require a FireWire connection (400Mbps). If your computer uses the slow, antiquated USB 1.0 (12Mbps) connection, this might not be the project for you. Assembling your drive is the easiest part. First, consult the drive&amp;#039;s manual and check that the jumpers are set to the &amp;quot;master&amp;quot; position. Then screw the hard drive into the case. Inside the case there will be two wires: a power cable and a data cable (the IDE or SATA cable mentioned above). Connect them to the drive. These are shaped so they can&amp;#039;t be inserted the wrong way. Close the case following manufacturer&amp;#039;s instructions, then connect all necessary external cables (power and USB). You have now built your own external drive. Before using your drive, install any software that comes with the case. Then make sure to format the drive. Look under the Removable Drives section of My Computer. Right click on the drive icon and select Format, and use the Quick Format (NTFS) feature. Then start filling your new closet with data. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/gadgets/how-to/a319/1926952/>