Learn to Build Your Own External Hard Drive Enclosure

By Jack Liu

An enclosure which is used to house a hard disk externally, adding storage and flexibility to any system is called Hard drive. The Computer is connected by the enclosure through a universal serial bus (USB) or Fire wire port, making it a plug-and-play device. When the system is up and running it can be turned Off and On. Providing portability between desktop and laptop, or home and office and also a hard drive enclosure can be used for many purposes.

A trivial conversion is carrying signal between different connector types. Retransmit data over connector and signal of a different standard is so complicated as to require a separate embedded system. Disk enclosures is surrounded by external DVD-ROM drives, factory assembled external hard disk drives and others.

Security is one of the main advantages to use an external hard drive enclosure. Online threats including viruses, Trojan Horses, Spyware, Hacking, Poorly written software and hateful script is the major concern for many people. Some threats can expose data to outside sources, while others corrupt it.

The following are external enclosures that can turn an internal IDE hard drive into an external one. Hard drives are sold separately or as options. External Enclosures are the best way to get an External USB 2.0 or IEEE1394 (Fire wire) Hard Drive. A drive and enclosure together typically cost much less than a pre-made external hard drive!

On an external hard drive installing financial data or sensitive programs can stay safe. If the user is not accessing the programs or data, then hard drive enclosure can be left off. External hard drive is one way to keep key information or software private from the family members who shares the computer.

For storing system back ups or Ghost images of the main hard disk an external hard drive is the perfect one. If the main drive fails, the ghost image on the external drive can re-create the main disk in mere minutes. Alternately, popular software like Acronis True Image will make a bootable carbon copy of the main disk on the external disk. In this case, the external disk can be removed from the enclosure and installed into the system for an instant fix. It is also possible to boot directly from the hard drive enclosure by using settings in the motherboard's Basic Input/Output System (BIOS) menu.

Memory-intensive libraries of music, movie, and graphic files using an external hard drive enclosure frees up on-board system resources for ripping, burning and downloading, while protecting libraries from online threats. Moving these libraries to an external drive also greatly reduces maintenance time for system tasks like file defragmentation, spyware sweeping and checking the virus...

We can use a hard drive enclosure to reuse "smaller" hard disks that have been replaced by newer, larger capacity drives. For example, as prices have dropped many people have replaced 30, 40 and 60-gigabyte (GB) drives with 250 GB drives or better. Installed in an external hard drive enclosure, older drives become quite useful for archiving.

We can rely on portable and external hard drives to hold our critical data. For many, changing a hard drive inside a computer is just not an option. So, they turn to external hard drive enclosures with built in high-capacity hard drives as the answer. But, with today easy to assemble modular hard drive enclosures, many built it themselves. The hard driver enclosures themselves come in plastic and aluminum hard drive enclosures, in a variety of styles and colors for every taste and use.

Jack Liu, a professional system expert in Computer and Networking industry, offers the best system cooling items like Case Fan, External Hard Drive Enclosure, CPU coolers, PC air conditioners, Notebook cooling fan ad many more. For more information, log to the website http://www.GoGoFan.com.