For comprehensive backups, every PC owner should have an external hard drive. You can find ready-made drives at high prices, but I find it’s much cheaper and easier to build your own. If you can handle a screwdriver, you do this DIY project. You need two pieces:
- Any hard drive. A standard 3.5-inch ATA (IDE) hard drive offers the best value. I recommend starting with a new drive rather than recycling an old drive, but if you have a big enough drive hanging around and you’re confident that it’s reliable, feel free to use it. These days, you can pick up a drive in the 80 – 200GB range for well under 50 cents a GB if you shop carefully. You can use 2.5-inch drives as well, but they’re more expensive.
- An external enclosure kit. You can find these at just about any online computer parts retailer. Look for an enclosure that has its own fan, an external power supply, and USB 2.0 or FireWire connections. Enclosures for a 3.5-inch drive typically cost $18 and up. (This search at Newegg.com is a great starting point.)
Assembling the drive is a snap. Open the enclosure and attach the included data and power connectors to the drive. Fasten the drive to the enclosure case with screws (which should be included). Snap the enclosure shut, turn on the power, and plug the drive into a spare USB 2.0 port. You’ll need to format the drive using Windows XP’s Disk Management console (diskmgmt.msc), after which you can use it just like any other drive.
A word of advice: Check the pictures and reviews for external enclosures separately. I’m willing to pay a little more to get quality construction instead of cheap plastic, and I also appreciate the low noise levels of a ball bearing fan. A few extra dollars now can pay dividends later.
Ed Bott 
Ed,
I created my own and did a little write up about it.
I love it, its a 200 gig external drive that I built for 100 bucks.
Take care,
Chuck
[Edited to make link clickable. – Ed]
Hi Ed, great tip, but one thing that I’ve noticed from doing this with a variety of enclosures and drives is that you can sometimes run into compatibility problems with older systems that do not ship with USB 2.0 support.
For example, my Dell PowerEdge server ships with USB 1.1 ports, and will blue-screen when I plug in a USB 2.0 drive enclosure. I added a USB 2.0 card and managed to get one of my two external drives to work, but the other still blue-screens. I might have better luck with a Maxtor or Western Digital external drive due to their compatibility testing… Sometimes you can work around this with a combo Firewire/USB drive enclosure (if you have Firewire ports), but these do cost more $$$
Anyway, great tip and blog!
Jason
Interesting observation, Jason. I also have a PowerEdge server, and I added a USB 2.0 card to it which has handled every external drive I’ve thrown at it. I would suspect the adapter card (or maybe the driver) in your case. If the USB 2.0 port is working correctly, it shouldn’t matter what external drive you throw at it.
This is a great tip. With a little shopping I came up with a price of .53 a GB which includes a good USB/Firewire metal enclosure–with a fan and cables, a 300GB name brand drive (and this even includes shipping).
I bought a 2.5″ enclosure a while ago, and stuffed an old Powerbook drive in it. The smaller size is much more portable, plus there’s no fan or external power supply. The case is extruded aluminium. Power is leeched from the USB via a second cable.
I upgraded a laptop from 30 GB, 4200 rpm drive to 60 GB, 7200 rpm drive(wow, what a performance jump–new drive also has 16 MB cache). For $25 I got a USB powered aluminum case for the old drive and that is now the backup drive for my wife’s laptop where we store a drive image weekly, dumping the old after we verit\fy the new. I have effective 27 GB for pennies.
I have built 4 such units. Easy to do and costs less than a pre-built off the shelf unit.