Problem: you’ve got a laptop or an older desktop that’s quickly running out of storage space for all the digital stuff that you’ve managed to accumulate.
Solution: You can purchase an external hard drive, effectively adding extra storage space to your same old computer. External hard drives connect to any computer via USB or FireWire.
Better Solution: You can build your own external hard drive — a process not much more complicated than legos — and add more storage space for your money to that same old computer.
All Things Marked presents “HOWTO: Build Your Own External Hard Drive“, a step-by-step guide to putting together your own Do-It-Yourself digital storage. From the article:
There are many reasons for you to build your own external hard drive(s).
- Its very easy and cheap. If you search well enough, you can find internal drives and enclosures that cost less than pre-built external drives.
- Since you can actually take out your drive, you can swap in another drive in very little time. If something happens to your desktop and you can’t log on, just put it in the enclosure and browse the drive from another machine. You then have full access to it and can scan and clean it up.
- If something happens and you need/want to buy a new one, you can still use the same enclosure (as long as the interfaces are the same).
Read “HOWTO: Build Your Own External Hard Drive” at All Things Marked.
