Adding an external hard drive the EASY way would be to just buy an external HD and attach it to a USB port (or Firewire, or eSATA but these days it's mostly USB 2.0).
The hard way is to buy your own enclosure and hard drive, hook them up yourselves and attach it to a USB port. It doesn't sound THAT hard, but in my case, it wasn't all that easy, and it's a lesson for all.
Look carefully and you can find cheap bare hard drives that are normally installed in a desktop (or even laptop) PC. I found a Western Digital 500GB HD on sale (with rebate) for cheap. I also found a nice looking aluminum external enclosure for about $20. When you do so, make sure that the drive and enclosure are compatible. For example, the driver interface must match. You can still buy IDE drives, although SATA is the rage. You have to make sure your enclosure matches that technology.
Additionally, you can buy either 2.5" or 3.5" hard drives. You also have to make sure your enclosure matches that as well.
Finally, cheap for rebates at those web-based rebate sites. I received a rebate of 4% from one of my rebate sites (MrRebates or Fatwallet, but I can't recall which).
Although I had never tried this sort of self-made USB drive before, I had hooked up new internal drives. Therefore, I thought it would be easy.
The first thing I did after getting all the parts was to hook up the bare hard drive to the "real" hardware of the enclosure (that is the part that has the USB hardware and the power connection, as well as the SATA port. I noticed the HD was making a clunking noise when I powered it up. Uh, oh.
After I connected it to the PC, as I figured, nothing happened. The hard drive was bad. I returned it for another, and they gave me a credit of $8 for shipping and it cost me $7.80 for shipping and insurance, fortunately.
After receiving the new hard drive, I hooked it up, sans clunking. Unfortunately, after I put things together (oops), I noticed I had screwed everything in but did not put the panel on top side of the enclosure. I was forced to unscrew things, and tried again.
The best test was connecting it to the PC. The drive is recognized and the normal "installing drivers" prompt came up. I open up Windows Explorer to see: nothing. Hey, where is it?!
Fortunately, I had a decent idea of what the issue was, but I wasn't 100% sure. I opened up the Disk Manager (Start, Settings, Control Panel, Administrative Tools, Computer Management, Disk Management) applet. I could see the drive, but no drive letter and no partition. I figured it was the partition that was missing that was derailing the whole thing.
Thing is, XP wasn't to conducive to partitioning the bare drive without using the control panel. I used the DiskPart command line tool. After partitioning it using the
a) List Disk,
b) Select Disk (2 in this case),
c) Create Primary Partition commands,
the partition was visible in Disk Management. At that point it was necessary to assign it a drive letter. All I had to do is right click on the drive in Disk Management, and viola, I could NOW select a drive letter.
From that point on, all that is involved is formatting the hard drive. The real question for folks is: is your time worth more than saving some bucks? Do you enjoy tinkering with hardware? If you do, this actually is sort of fun, and if you are extracting a hard drive from your PC to replace it with a larger one, quite useful.
By the way, most of the above will apply to Windows Vista and Windows 7 as well. However, since XP is still the dominant Windows OS, at the time of this writing, I used that OS instead of the nascent Windows 7.
Written by Michael Santo
HULIQ.com
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