So, I have been storing a desktop tower at my parents house since my sophomore year of college with no real intention of doing anything with it.  Then I overheard my brother-in-law, Jeremy, talking about taking the hard drive out of a desktop tower and put it into an external case. This makes an external hard drive.

So after some thinking, I decided to try it out.  I ordered an external enclosure from NewEgg.com, this one to be exact.

If you are planning on doing this project, make sure to purchase the enclosure that is compatible with the hard drive you are removing. My hard drive has an IDE connector, which is used in most older computers.  You can read about the difference in IDE and SATA connectors on this PCStats.com page. You will also want to make sure and purchase the correct enclosure size.  Here is the had drive Wikipedia entry that discusses size and other information. This project can also be performed on a hard drive from a laptop.

I followed this YouTube video to open the tower up and remove the hard-drive. The tower in the video is pretty much the same tower I had.

Once I pulled the hard drive out, I removed the metal casing that protected the hard drive while in the tower.

Then I disassembled the external enclosure that I purchased from NewEgg. I plugged the IDE connection cable and power plug into my hard drive.

Then I secured the hard drive to the enclosure. And put the enclosure back together.  I plugged it in to the wall and plugged the USB cable into my laptop. Et voilà! We now have an external hard drive!

The hard drive I had was 40 GB and the enclosure cost me about $20, and you can get 10 GB thumb drives from Wal-mart for about $10. So I may call this a $20 savings. (If you wanted more space and didn’t have a hard drive lying around, Wal-mart has 500 GB external hard drives for $50, which is a better deal. But the hard drive we had was free and I can always look for another one with a larger storage capacity.)

This project was to backup Melissa’s pictures on her laptop. Hopefully she will go through and delete some of the unnecessary ones before backing them up. AND IT WORKS!!

Have you ever attempted this? Do you have any other tips for this projects, like where to find broken down desktop towers?