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Making my own external harddrive?

J

jive

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Apr 14, 2006
501
0
Scotland
I want to run iTunes (currently sitting at 134Gb) from an external disk. I have it on a USB Seagate 250Gb one at the moment but ideally I'd like to use that as an iMac backup and use another to run iTunes from.


Now what do I need to do this myself? 250/320Gb would be excellent sizes for the HD but I don't really know what I'm doing. FireWire would be a good idea due to speed etc wouldn't it?


So yeah, any tutorials or links anyone is willing to give me?


Cheers
 
I hope you don't mean make your own hard drive.. Anyway all you need is a hard drive of your choosing and an external enclosure of some sort. Just make the enclosure supports the size drive you chose.
 
external encloser + hard drive.....

step one : Buy enclosure and hard drive
step two: Place hard drive in enclosure and plug in
step three: Find out you just saved $$ for 2 minutes worth of work.
step four: Pat self on back. Good job.

edit: USB or Firewire...PATA or SATA...it doesn't matter, either match up will work fine for your needs.
 
Go to OWC and pick a drive and an enclosure. Or go to newegg.com. Or get a drive from one of those, newegg has better prices and get a case from just about anywhere. Cool drives are good. They use Oxford 922 cases. Yes, get a firewire. Probably only need 400. Most cases will be Firewire 400 and USB 2.0
 
They're both US sites - any good UK ones? eBuyer has ****** customer service and overclockers is expensive (but good)...
 
If you dont need a very fast transfer rate between you computer and hard drive then i would recommend you get a usb 2.0. You can use it with other pc laptop and desktops that often come without firewire.
 
jive said:
any good UK ones? eBuyer has ****** customer service and overclockers is expensive (but good)...
Click to expand...

Aria.co.uk
Komplett.co.uk

Had good service from both.

Almost all external drives require a mains adaptor as well (USB or firewire ) - the only ones I know that don't are most of the smaller 2.5" externals which are all <160gb and use two ( or in WD's case, one ) usb socket.
Doug
 
(this is a crosspost from OS X forum)

Could someone explain to me, or point me towards a guide that explains the various snazzy bootup-methods useful on a Macbook?

I want to buy a Lacie USB-drive to connect for my APE Base Station, ordered yesterday and on its way. I might also "build" an external drive by picking a storage cabinet with both USB 2.0 and FW and then mount a cheap 250 gig drive inside.

But my friend mentioned that if you have a firewire drive you can do some snazzy booting up on another device. This doesn't work on USB, you MUST use firewire.

I am not exactly sure what it is you're able to do. I've heard about booting in "targeted mode" and other stuff. But what is it?

Is it possible for me to make a partition on the laciedisk and use that as bootdevice? This would be if my mac had a hd failure, perhaps.

Or is this just for using ie. a macbooks hd to bootup a imac without taking the macbook drive out (using the mb's controller logic and power)? It sounds really great, so I want to make sure I do not buy a harddisk that locks me out of this option. But if its only for using one mac's harddisk (while its still inside its machine) to boot on another device, then I don't really need to go out of my way to get a Firewire interface for my external hd, do I?

I'm confounded
 
Airforce said:
step one : Buy enclosure and hard drive
step two: Place hard drive in enclosure and plug in
step three: Find out you just saved $$ for 2 minutes worth of work.
step four: Pat self on back. Good job.
Click to expand...
step four b: Kick yourself for choosing a crappy enclosure that works half the time, requires both of the built-in USB ports, and is painflully slow. Been there, done that, never doing it again... =)
 
I have this enclosure. It's quiet and keeps the drive cool.

The next enclosure I will get is this. I will find two quality SATA drives and put them in. I currently have a dual enclosure (FW 800) made by CoolMax (I think). It runs really well but I'm running out of space with all the iMovies...

I gave up on store bought external hard drives because Maxtor's enclosures suck. But now that I've made my own I haven't had any problems at all. Plus I've saved money by doing so.

Nuc
 
If you care at all about speed, make sure you get an enclosure with an Oxford chipset. These are often 20%-50% faster than all others. If you see something by Genesys or Prolific, turn in the opposite direction and run away as fast as you can.
 
I would recommend this 3.5" USB enclosure for SATA drives. I've used one for nearly two years now, and no problems with it whatsoever.

Not only does it fit in with Apple's designs, it's also got a blue LED underneath, which lights up when it's on, and flickers when reading/writing. (I had to buy a second enclosure for a second external drive last year, and nothing on the market here in Hong Kong even remotely came close to looking as cool!)

Yoyotech are London based, and I've found them to be very trustworthy and helpful. Actually, I bought a HD from them at the same time, and they volunteered to fit it into the enclosure, and format the drive for me. (I was less experienced back then.)

Icybox from Yoyotech.co.uk
 
Nuc said:
I have this enclosure. It's quiet and keeps the drive cool.

The next enclosure I will get is this. I will find two quality SATA drives and put them in. I currently have a dual enclosure (FW 800) made by CoolMax (I think). It runs really well but I'm running out of space with all the iMovies...

I gave up on store bought external hard drives because Maxtor's enclosures suck. But now that I've made my own I haven't had any problems at all. Plus I've saved money by doing so.

Nuc
Click to expand...


Don't mean to hijack the thread, but I am also in the market for an enclosure but one that supports 2 SATA drives that I can configure in a RAID 1 (i.e. increased data security) format, through firewire 400. I too have been eyeing the OWC enclosure, but it does not support RAID 1 (mirroring) as far as I can tell.

My next question may be a bit naive, but can I take two external 250 GB harddrives with their own enclosures from the factory(nonidentical...one an Iomega and the other a Seagate) and set them up in a RAID 1 format for increased security with OS X? Thanks for the help.
 
Shaker said:
Don't mean to hijack the thread, but I am also in the market for an enclosure but one that supports 2 SATA drives that I can configure in a RAID 1 (i.e. increased data security) format, through firewire 400. I too have been eyeing the OWC enclosure, but it does not support RAID 1 (mirroring) as far as I can tell.

My next question may be a bit naive, but can I take two external 250 GB harddrives with their own enclosures from the factory(nonidentical...one an Iomega and the other a Seagate) and set them up in a RAID 1 format for increased security with OS X? Thanks for the help.
Click to expand...
I found this enclosure that works with RAID 1. However, it's not a SATA enclosure. You could probably find something else.

Nuc
 
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