external HD kit questions

[WarmMachineME]

So I'm finally getting a huge upgrade accomplished, and I've got a Seagate 500gb SATA hard drive on the way to use. Should be much better than the 80gb and 40gb IDE drives I'm struggling with right now.

I had been planning on sticking the old IDE drives into the new computer long enough to get the images and documents I wanted to keep. But I was concerned about the whole 3rd party IDE controller issue (new mobo is an Asus P5K Deluxe). Plus, I've got a few of these older drives laying around that could be used as backup storage, so I started thinking an external enclosure would be the way to go.

Will I have problems if I buy just one enclosure and swap these drive in and out, or are they meant to be closed up and stay closed once assembled? Also, most of the info I've found when trying to shop for one talks about ghosting and software backups and so on. I'd rather just have it plug and play. Put a drive in, plug it up to the new comp, pull off my files, format the drive, and presto, a brand new little back up drive.

[cmichael258]

You should not have any problem doing that. I pulled my old 100GB Maxtor drive and put it in an external case purchased on ebay. Works great and I backup my critical files from my C drive to it.

[Petef56]

Yes you can swap out various hard drives using the external hard drive enclosures. I've worked
with a few and have to warn you that certain brands can cause interferance with radio and
tv reception and also may not connect via the USB port reliably.

I highly recommend using external HD enclosures but be careful which brand you buy.
So far, my experience has been that the one with internal power supply created the most
interferance with TV and radio. The model is a DIGITAL 125.

I have another one ENERMAX that works more reliably and has the external powersupply.
This one also creates slight interferance on the TV while transferring data but it works
more reliably than the one above.

I purchased these units from eBay a year or so ago.
Maybe we could use a review of the different brands of HD enclosures
to guide you on which brand to buy. I'd buy another one if I knew which
one was most reliable and did not interfere with TV and radio reception.

---pete---

[TwoRails]

If you're going to be swapping drives a lot, like I do, then you may want to consider the dongle style. I've got a couple from Geeks:

http://www.geeks.com/products_sc.asp?cat=404