T1B

I posted a week or two ago about my troubles with an external hard drive. Long story short, the external hard drive went to shit again after reformatting. I'm assuming it's crapped out for good (It's about two years old). It still works, but accessing folders takes forever and a day now.

So I bought a 200 gig harddrive at Compusa last week for 30 bucks after over 100 dollars in rebates. I replaced my 80 gig D drive with the 200, so now I have room for all my music and then some. The problem is, now I have this nice 80 gig drive with nowhere to put it since I have two internal hard drives and two disk drives.

I've heard you can turn an internal into an external. How would one go about doing that?

Buy an external enclosure, open it up, set your hard drive jumper to MASTER, and put it in.
Plug it in to a USB port (or FireWire if you chose that) and format using Windows Disk Management.

You can also put it internally if you purchase an ATA PCI controller card.

Thanks a lot! The drive I replaced is not that old so it'll make a nice external drive to replace the POS that I have now that is on its last legs...

I'm sure you are just throwing that drive out there as a suggestion/deal for someone who needs an external drive, but that enclosure already has a drive in it. If you want a 3.5" drive enclosure and you aren't sure what you want try your local PC store or BestBuy. Its not the cheapest solution, but it will give you an idea of what you are getting.
Alternatively, Newegg or tigerdirect are good places to order.

Also for anyone who is interested in upgrading a laptop, you can get 2.5" external enclosures and the nice thing is that the 2.5" small enclosures are only a little bigger then 2 decks of cards and don't require a seperate power cord. A great way to carry around your extra stuff if you take your external drive on the road. Also nice for sharing music and movies with friends. You can just take over the drive, without having to lug along a power supply or a whole computer. The only limitation on the USB 2.5" external drives is that the largest HD size is 100Gb.

ElTaco wrote:...and don't require a seperate power cord.

Not necessarily so. USB ports generally only put out 500mA, so the external 2.5" suggestion isn't universal for all drives, although some externals provide a secondary USB plug to draw power.