Converting an external HDD to an internal HDD - 56K beware!

TeeJayHoward

TeeJayHoward

Limpness Supreme
Joined
Feb 8, 2005
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How to convert an external USB HDD to an internal

The first thing you will need is obviously the USB enclosure. I picked this one up at CompUSA for $30. You can get one off eBay for about half that.


This is what is included in the package.


And when you open it up...


First, disconnect the front LEDs. You can use these later if you wish, but I decided not to. My case is cluttered enough, as is.


Unscrew the circuitboard from the chassis and disconnect the power switch.


Remember the location of the hole that the power switch connects to.


See this? It's big, it's bulky, it's... Useless. Keep it or toss it, I don't care.


You might want to test it first, though... Note that I placed a HDD jumper in the place of the power switch. It now is on full time.


More testing is always good.


WARNING - What I am about to do is dumb. I had to buy a soldering iron because mine is a bit... Uhh... Broken and lost.


I told you I was dumb. I cut up a 3-pin to 4-pin fan pass-through dohickey and soldered it to the wires on the board. It would have been smarter to replace the existing right-angle molex with a different gendered one, or to solder the wires right into the board. If I create another one, I will do it the "right" way. I then proceeded to wrap the wires in electrical tape, seperating each wire so they don't short out.


Example.


Here I screwed the circuitboard on to the back of a 40GB WD HDD utilizing 2 motherboard screws and spacers.


Unfortunatly only one side fit. This isn't that side


This is.


I used a molex splitter and some garbage ties to connect the HDD and the circuitboard to one power socket.


Here I attached a USB socket to my mobo tray, and connected it to the header on the mobo. Plug in the HDD, and cross your fingers.

I'm sure a lot of you are wondering WHY the hell I did this. In theory, it's possible to have nothing but USB cables cluttering up a computer case, and these are easily hidden. In addition, every HDD installed this way is "theoretically" hot-swappable. In practice, a custom drive enclosure (Like those $15 IDE racks at CompUSA... Hmm...) would make it hot-swappable. In reality, I was just bored.
 
pretty sweet idea, i have a bunch of those cheap compusa enclusures because they were marked as $9.99 so i bought 4 of them with no drives to put in them. maybe i will try this on my file server or something.

can i have your LCD? Please?:D
 
compslckr said:
pretty sweet idea, i have a bunch of those cheap compusa enclusures because they were marked as $9.99 so i bought 4 of them with no drives to put in them. maybe i will try this on my file server or something.
Click to expand...

Damn... I paid $30 each for mine... And they're in my file server right now. Current setup:

1x 40GB OS HDD
1x 40GB USB Storage (Internal)
3x 40GB RAID-0 Storage
1x 80GB USB Storage (External)
1x100GB USB Storage (External)
____________________________
380GB Preformat Capacity

Next step - Bite on some of those $135 250GB SATA drives. And maybe upgrade from a no-name PSU to something nicer. But I've got about 120GB to fill, first, and that'll take me at least a month.
 
Interesting change... I was thinking the whole time, WHY??? I mean it would be easier to just use SATA drives if hiding was the whole idea. But looking at your drives in use your probably trying to go fairly inexpensive. Not that adding 15-30 dollars per drive to do this change would net you cheap drives, but oh well... Anyways, here's to being bored... :)
 
If you're like me, and have a decent investment in your IDE drives (400gb worth here) and don't have money to replace them all with Serial ATA drives, this will be a good idea for converting them into a USB drive, to make them hot swappable. It also eliminates the need to buy a controller card.


However I still think it's funny that you took an internal drive, attached it to an external enclosure, and then modded it to be internal again.

Behold: The power of boredom.
 
Behold: The power of boredom.

hell ya

that gave me a great idea to make my removable bay hot swappable...i hate shutting down just to remove the drive and put it back in and hour later...kills my uptime record...i wonder if my board us 2.0...cuz i hate losing speed
 
lol I had one of these and the usb enclosure started failing on me so I ripped it open and got the drive out. Worked just fine after I found out it was a UATA hdd.
 
IceWind said:
I fail to see what you gained from this :confused:
Click to expand...

Hot-swappability.
An extra 40GB of storage space.
Not using any extra desk space.
Not using an extra power outlet.
Not using an extra IDE controller
A really cool-looking clump of circuitry sitting in my computer.
A hole in my wallet.
 
SpangeMonkee said:
so, basically, you made a HD that was portable, not portable?
Click to expand...

Actually, I took a non-portable drive, turned it portable, and then made it non-portable again.
 
he was bored and gained knowledge on something...what else do you need to learn....boredom sux...
 
so let me get this straight - instead of buying a $10 PATA IDE card that can run 4 extra drives and sticking with 133mB/s, you downgraded your harddrives to a max data thruput of 12mb/s?? even if you use USB2.0, you still can only get a theoretical 50mB/s... thats on par with the 66mB/s of my 486. not only that, because USB is a perhipable interface and not in the internal PCI bus, it has to compeate for the CPU's attention with only one interupt for every device on USB, where each PCI card gets its own intrurupt.

so tell me why this is a good idea? if you were just trying to do something unique, you get an A for creativity - but there is no practical aplication other then hot swapable HDD arrays, and if you want to do this just use SCSI (cheaper then PATA these days)
 
Please read the posts. Something like this makes the drives hot swappable. Now, he does lose speed, but he needed another hard drive anyway, and I doubt he's running any high-perfomance apps off of it.

And good grief, read the last line: He was bored! :p
 
theshadow27 said:
so let me get this straight - instead of buying a $10 PATA IDE card that can run 4 extra drives and sticking with 133mB/s, you downgraded your harddrives to a max data thruput of 12mb/s?? even if you use USB2.0, you still can only get a theoretical 50mB/s... thats on par with the 66mB/s of my 486. not only that, because USB is a perhipable interface and not in the internal PCI bus, it has to compeate for the CPU's attention with only one interupt for every device on USB, where each PCI card gets its own intrurupt.

so tell me why this is a good idea? if you were just trying to do something unique, you get an A for creativity - but there is no practical aplication other then hot swapable HDD arrays, and if you want to do this just use SCSI (cheaper then PATA these days)
Click to expand...

I......cant.....stop......laughing................
 
IceWind said:
I......cant.....stop......laughing................
Click to expand...

I'm right there with ya.

Yes, people, there is no real reason. Boredom makes you work in mysterious ways. However, I REALLY like the itty-bitty USB cable instead of the huge clunking P/ATA. Enough that I was considering doing it 4 more times and getting rid of P/ATA all together. Speed is not an issue. I took that in to consideration. This file server does nothing more than stream anime to whatever computer I feel like watching it on. (Normally the laptop. WiFi is more of a limitation than USB right now.)

For the most part, consider this a joke of sorts, a waste of money and proof of concept.
 
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