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
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:
- A USB hard disk enclosure that matches whatever type of drive you intend to install. Generally, this means a PATA or EIDE enclosure and drive, or a SATA enclosure and drive. For this recipe, I used a PATA enclosure, the AcomData HDDEXXU2E3 3.5-inch USB 2.0 Hard Drive Enclosure. It was on sale for just under $29 at my local Fry's, and I've seen it online for about the same price.
- You can also find plenty of good enclosures online for about $20. These include Iomagic's 3.5-inch external USB 2.0 IDE Hard Drive Case (about $12); Sabrent's 3.5-inch USB2.0 IDE PATA HDD enclosure ($18); PC Loft's 3.5-inch SATA HDD Enclosure ($22); and CP Technologies' USB 2.0 PATA HDD Enclosure ($23). Whichever you choose, keep the installation guide handy. And of course, prices may vary.
- A compatible hard disk to install inside the enclosure. I chose a 200-GB ATA/100 (PATA) 7200-RPM Maxtor hard disk with 8 MB of cache. This was on sale at Fry's for just under $70, which is less than a 160-GB model in the same series from Maxtor goes for. You can also make good use of older drives or find good deals on newer ones. In general, I recommend 300 GB or larger, especially for SATA.
- A small Philips-head screwdriver. You'll use this for mounting the drive into the internal drive cage, and for fastening the drive cage inside the actual enclosure.
- A paper clip. You'll use this to remove the jumper from its default "slave drive" setting. This is needed to configure the drive you install into the enclosure as the "master" drive inside the enclosure. (For more, see "PATA Master and Slave Drives" below.)
- Needlenose pliers (optional). You may use a small pair of needlenose pliers to move the jumper block, if one is available.
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.
- Unpack the drive enclosure from its carton, and review the assembly instructions. You should find one or two small packages of fasteners, a power supply and cord, and the enclosure itself, probably with a cage or insert inside, as was the case with the AcomData unit I purchased. You should also find instructions on how to set up the drive and how to insert the power and data connectors.
- Selecting the screws can be tricky. So in the following photo, the screws on the left (with lock washers) are for mounting the drive to the cage. The machine screws (no washers) are for mounting the back of the enclosure to the cage, which also seals the enclosure itself.
- For an AcomData unit (because we're using a PATA drive), begin by setting the proper drive status with a two-pin jumper block (see the section below, "PATA Master and Slave Drives," for why this is necessary).
- Most PATA drives ship from the factory jumpered for "cable select" status, as shown in the photo below. You must remove the jumper block from pin block 2 (second from the left) and place it on pin block 1 (all the way to the left). That way, it can be the master drive, as also shown in the following photo. This is easy to do with a paper clip. Just make sure to bend the paper clip as depicted in the tools photo earlier in this story. Alternatively, use a pair of small needlenose pliers. If you use pliers, be extra careful when reaching in among the pins, and use as little force as possible, to avoid bending them.
- When shipped from the factory, the Maxtor drive has its jumper on pin block 2, as shown in the photo below. Look for the small black plastic jumper block in the middle row of pins (it's between the large data connector at the left), and the small four-prong power connector at the right:
- For the unit to work properly, you must move the jumper one position to the left, to pin block 1, as shown here:
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.
- Once the jumper block is set correctly, you should place the drive onto the cage, with the connector end down, facing the back of the cage. This lines the power connector up with its cable, and the data connector up with the receptacle at the back of cage, as shown in the photo below. If you lay the drive down so that the connector end faces the connectors at the back of the cage, everything should line up properly.
- Plug the power cable into its receptacle (it's the four-prong cable with the white connector shown in the photo above). This will require a little gentle force to get the cable seated properly. Also, this cable is very short, so a little manual dexterity will help. I started the connector into its receptacle very gently with my fingers, then held the drive with my right hand while pushing the back of connector with my left index finger. It seated very easily.
- Once the connector is lined up with the receptacle and guided in just a little way, you can use some gentle force to seat it all the way, as depicted in this next photo:
- Slide the drive toward the back of the cage so that its data connector--located on the other side of the drive from the power cable--seats into its mate on the cage. Push gently to seat the data connector into its receptacle on the cage. Easy does it! When seated, the drive should look like this:
- Flip the cage over, and screw the four mounting screws (the ones with lock washers) through the holes in the cage into the threaded openings on the bottom of the hard disk. You don't need to put a lot of torque on these screws; hand-tightened will be sufficient. Use your Philips screwdriver to fasten all four of the mounting screws through the cage into the drive housing, as shown here:
- Slide the cage into one side of the enclosure. Note that cutouts on the back of the cage match the groove in the case, so you can only insert it one way. Fasten the cage backplate to the back of the cage, using the four machine screws (the ones with no lock washers). For your reference, the backplate is the black plastic piece shown in the following photo:
- Here's how the finished backplate looks when all the fasteners are in place:
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.