External Hard Drive Enclosure

My laptop has been acting up a little bit lately, and it’s been a little while since a reinstall, so I’m getting myself into the reformat mindset. I don’t want to lose everything on my hard drive, and I don’t want to burn 20 DVDs, so I started looking around for an external hard drive.

I started looking around NewEgg and TigerDirect to see what’s on the market.  I only really need about 100 or 150 GB, but it was looking like I’d be spending about $50 for that sort of size.  When I see 1TB drives (~8 times the size) for less than $125 (2.5 times the price), I couldn’t really justify getting ONLY 160 GB.  But at the same time, I don’t have $125 to spend right now.  So I was rather turned off of external hard drives.

When I remembered the dead computer sitting in my closet (I think it’s either a motherboard or CPU problem but don’t have anything to test that…), I realized that there is a 160GB SATA (and a 60GB IDE) drive in there, which I would actually like to get information off of as well!  So that’s when I started looking at external hard drive enclosures.

I found this one at NewEgg.  It works with both SATA and IDE hard drives, it had good reviews, and for $37 with shipping & handling, it was certainly cheaper than buying an external hard drive.  I ordered it Sunday night (2 hours and 13 minutes before a $10 mail-in rebate started… I’m going to see if I can get that anyways..), and it got here this afternoon (I love NewEgg’s speed!)!  I popped in an old hard drive (for testing purposes), and it worked right off the bat!  Now I can access the files I haven’t been able to touch in 2 years… and I can get ready for a reformat!

For $20 from now until March 30, I would definitely recommend picking up one of these bad boys if you have any internal hard drives or plans to buy one!