Build USB Drive Enclosures

Building your own hard-disk enclosure can also let you house newer, faster SATA (serial ATA) drives. While enclosures are becoming available for SATA drives, I don't cover them in detail in this Recipe. But what I do discuss will provide guidance for working with the newer SATA enclosures, as the only real differences apply to the power and data connectors used to hook the drive into its enclosure. (For more background, see Directron.org's article, Parallel vs. Serial ATA.)

So if you've got 10 minutes to spare, a drive and suitable enclosure, and a couple of small hand tools, you can package up a USB or Firewire (IEEE 1394) external drive, serve your customers, and pocket $20 to $30 for your efforts.

With a little comparison shopping and a small amount of time and effort, you can build a USB drive enclosure for your customers or for your own use. Because you can usually save $20 or more as compared to the cost of a prefab unit, you can pocket the difference. (The amount usually goes up in proportion to the size of the drive.) This is also a great way to get continued use out of drives from retired PCs, or to take advantage of unused drives you may have in inventory.

Ingredients

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External USB hard disk enclosures are set up to accommodate standard drives and configurations with ease. Any compatible hard disk will slide into the case. After that, all you'll have to do is plug in or mate-up a couple of connectors--one for power, the other for data--and screw in a few machine screws. With practice, I was able to assemble this project in less than eight minutes. Best of all, the only tools I needed were a Philips-head screwdriver, a paper clip and my fingers. Nor did I need any special expertise.

To install a hard disk into a suitable USB disk enclosure, all you'll need are the following components and tools:

Four Steps to Installing a PATA Hard Disk in a Drive Enclosure

If you're using a SATA hard disk and enclosure, rather than PATA, you will follow all of the following steps, with one exception: Because SATA needs no jumpers to set the drive status as "master" or "slave," you can skip those instructions. Your connectors for data will also look different, because SATA is much more compact than PATA. But plug-ins for these enclosures are so modular, as long as you position the drives properly, you should be able to mate them up without much difficulty.

With these provisos in mind, let's begin. Unless you hit a snag, the whole process should take less than 10 minutes.

PATA Master and Slave Drives

Most PCs can support either one or two devices. Because the parallel cables can support two devices, each IDE, EIDE, or PATA drive must designate itself as either a master (that is, the first drive in a two-drive chain) or a slave (the second drive in a two-drive chain).

By default, the "cable select" jumper is set at the factory. This lets the cable determine which drive is the master and which drive is the slave. This works fine inside a PC, and its lets the user forgo determining which drive takes which role. But inside a USB enclosure, such as the AcomData unit covered in this Recipe, the drive must be jumpered to be a master. This involves the tweaks I described earlier.

For more information on this topic, see this PC Guide article: Single, Master, and Slave Drives and Jumpering. Also, check out the related sections featured in the left-hand column of this page, which contains a wealth of useful information. Installing the Hard Disk into its Enclosure

In the next series of steps, you'll insert the hard drive into a cage that will ultimately be housed inside the drive enclosure. Therefore, these five steps require you to position the drive properly, to make necessary attachments for power and data, and to anchor the device inside the enclosure.

That's it for assembly. To check your work, plug the power supply into the round four-prong receptacle on the backplate, and then plug the power supply into a wall socket. Next, you'll want to plug the Mini-A plug (small squarish connector) from the USB cable into the back of the unit; then plug the regular type A plug (larger, but narrower in cross-section) into an empty USB socket on your PC. Turn on the power, using the rocker switch near the top of the backplate. If the indicator light turns on and you hear the drive spin up, you're doing fine. If Windows recognizes a new drive on the machine, you're home free.

Troubleshooting

During installation, you may encounter either or both of two common problems. First, if the drive won't power up, this probably means you have a loose power connection inside the enclosure. If so, you'll need to open and reseat your power connector. Second, if Windows won't recognize a PATA drive, the most likely cause is incorrect jumper settings. To be sure, double-check the installation guide for the drive to make sure you've got it right.

While you're in there, make sure the data connection is firmly seated. This is the other primary cause of OS-recognition problems, unless you're running Windows 98, in which case you must install a driver for things to work properly. The Win98 driver is included on the CDs that accompany both the hard disk and drive enclosure.

If Windows won't recognize a SATA drive, there may be trouble with internal data connections. So you'll want to check those, as well.

If the system still isn't working properly, even after all these changes, you may have issues with either the enclosure or the drive itself. To find out, you'll probably need to call tech support for one or both units after going through all the above checks one more time.

ED TITTEL is a writer and trainer in Austin, Texas, who specializes in Windows topics and tools, especially PC hardware, networking and security.