External vs. Home made

I buy hard drives and put them into external enclosures.

Much easier to swap drives as I need to.

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I think I pay under $30 for aluminum enclosures, USB and ESATA.
 
I'd go with the home-made solution, though it might end up costing a bit more, you'd end up with a hard disk that you know what's inside, the model number, its specs, and its size, you still keep the warranty because most consumer-grade external hard disks use basic, "lower-end" hard disks since they're all tied onto USB that'll bottleneck the drive anyways (think the cheap 8MB cache, older tech hard drives), as well as voiding the external hard drive's warranty by opening the external case.

You also have greater selection in which external case you'd use, and that could boil down to simple aesthetics, build quality, or I/O options such as USB, FireWire, or eSATA, or if you get a good external case, all three. :D
 
Yanno, you can buy any old external hard drive and replace what's inside. It's not like they're sealed with SuperGlue or anything. I grabbed a Seagate 2.5" 160GB external earlier this year from Circuit City for $80 (got lucky as it was a pricing error, their mistake so I pounced on it) and recently just opened it up and put a 320GB in it, and put the 160GB in an external 2.5" case I found at a flea market for $1. So yeah, you can get the regular external hard drives and continue to swap drives as necessary.

For ease of use, it can be advantageous to get a bare drive and some external enclosure and do it yourself, sure. I use both methods myself, so...
 
I found a nifty enclosure at Frys that lets me plug in a 2.5/3.5 sata drive up to 1 ter like a big fat floppy disk.

I have the advantages of knowign what disk is being used, selecting it myself, and being able to swap them easily.
 
Elf_Boy said:
I found a nifty enclosure at Frys that lets me plug in a 2.5/3.5 sata drive up to 1 gig like a big fat floppy disk.

I have the advantages of knowign what disk is being used, selecting it myself, and being able to swap them easily.
Click to expand...

I hope you mean 1 terabyte not 1 gig.;)

I found a 65$ 120gb western digital external at BB over a year ago and jumped on it. She is still working just fine. *knock on wood*
 
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