USB External Enclosures Guide
If you have any hard drive you don't use or just removed your old internal laptop disk replacing it with a
bigger one, you can convert it to external USB hard drive using one of available EIDE to USB 2.0 adapters
with external drive casing.
There are adapters in all sizes from the smallest 1.8" to 5.25" so you can adapt any EIDE disk you have. You can try to hunt some great deal on used hard drive and make your own external USB drive at very low cost.
The cheapest offer on the most popular desktop computer 3.5" hard drives enclosure I've found was BYTECC USB enclosure for $27. It comes with USB 2.0 interface and external power supply. Just like any other USB drive you can hot plug USB external enclosure and it is automatically detected and installed by operating system. In Windows you will see it as additional drive in My Computer. For user, there isn't any difference between using internal drive or drive installed in external enclosure.
If you have desktop computer you can easily connect hard drive from someone else who want to exchange bigger amount of data with you, even if you don't have inner rack hard disk enclosure. However, if you have only laptop computer and use it as desktop replacement it isn't possible, unless you have external hard drive enclosure. If you would like to use your external hard drive enclosure this way, choose enclosure with screwless design that allows for easy and quick replacement of installed hard disk.
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