Great...another fool with an external HD ?

Hey all, I'm thinking, no I AM going to make my own external hard drive. Has anyone done this and how easy is it really? People tell me it's easy, but they are the computer guys that can do anything on them. And will I need drivers, etc or will OSX read and format automatically? Also can you make your own bus-powered hard drive? I know that my firelite I have works without external power on my PC, but not on my PB. That is a pain in the *** too! Thanks.
Jared

I've pretty much built all of my externals.

1-Go to a computer or electronics store and buy a Hard Drive case. There will be a few choices, USB 2 and Firwire and some that will do both. Buy what will meet your needs best. A good factor to think about: Which do you have more open ports of on your Mac, USB2 or FW? Make sure you know if the external case is for ATA/IDE drives or SATA drives.

2-Find a deal or sale on a big IDE or SATA hard drive, depending which you bought a case for.

3-Put the drive in the case and plug the FW or USB 2 connector into your Mac.

4-One of two things will happen. Either the drive will just mount on your desktop or OSX will tell you and unformatted drive has been inserted and ask you what you want to do with it. Click Format and OSX will open up Disc Utility. If you are only going to use the Drive on a Mac, select Mac HFS Plus (Journaled). If the drive will be used with a Windows machine as well, select MS-DOS and click format.

5-Once the drive has mounted on your desktop, use it.

I don’t know about Bus powered drives, none of mine are.

Also consider that if you plan to clone to the drive, and want to be able to boot from it, it'll have to be firewire capable. And having said that, if you can find an enclosure with an Oxford chipset, all the better. Generally speaking, that chipset seem to be most compatible across the board (with Intel Macs, software like "SuperDuper!").

Most sites i've been looking on dont mention the chip sets, is there a list or a simple way to check them?

also will there be any noticable differences between the sata/ide drives?

Thanks

I'm thinking of doing exactly the same thing. Great post!

I intended to connect the external drive to my router so that I could use it to back up both my wife's PC and my Mac. Are there any enclosures that offer this capability or is it even possible?

I bought a USB/Firewire enclosure from CompUSA (their brand) and a Maxtor 120 GB PATA drive. I use SuperDuper to clone my internal drive to it and have no problems. I verfied that I can boot from the external drive.

Erudite.Warrior said:

I'm thinking of doing exactly the same thing. Great post!

I intended to connect the external drive to my router so that I could use it to back up both my wife's PC and my Mac. Are there any enclosures that offer this capability or is it even possible?

Click to expand...

What you would need is NAS, network attached storage,. which gets very expensive, it is cheaper to just share the drive off a computer.



i like Vantec's external cases, i am not sure how much the chipset really matters in the casing.