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Building External storage devices for half price |
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Written by hevnsnt
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Friday, 21 October 2005 |
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Page 2 of 2
Building the 3.5" External Drive
As with the 2.5" drives I will test both the "cheapo" enclosure along with a higher-quality enclosure. The cheapo external drive enclosure that I will be using a NEO N525U2-SL-NEC costs around $20, and the higher-quality (Vantec Nexstar3) enclosure runs about $40 at online retailers.
Required materials:
- 3.5" IDE Hard Drive. This is your every day harddrive that you can pick up anywhere. Normally these drives are used as internal drives inside desktop computers. We will be discussing building our enclosure with a 300GB big-boy. Again, I suggest you read the article on "finding the best deal online" as harddrive deals are ALWAYS around. However just looking at Newegg, I was able to find a 300GB Western Digital for $115.
- 3.5" Enclosure (I have previously discussed the two I will be using -- but you will only need one)
When I compared the two enclosures side by side, I found that the Vantec enclosure was quite a bit smaller, and did NOT include a cooling fan. I found this pretty interesting because at this point I felt the cheapo had a small advantage.....
Jumping in I decided to build the Neo enclosure. When I opened it, I found that it was also setup to accept 5.25" drives which makes the enclosure quite a bit bigger.. (you can see that the 3.5" drive kind of swimms in there)
As you can see the hard-drive just connects to an internal IDE and power cable, and then screws into the case. As you can see there is plenty of wasted space as this enclosure can handle 5.25" drives as well. (but we will not get into that) Since 3.5" Drives require more power than the 2.5" drives, you have to connect both a USB cable along with a Power cable in order to use them.
I connected the USB Cable, and then pluged in the powercord.. Hold on a second, I cant even type... It seems as though a 747 jetliner is taking off in my office. Wow, as I reached to the back of the enclosure and VERY happy to find that it included a power switch. I quickly shut it off. As I turned it off I recognized the familiar bee-booop of my windows machine notifying me that the device had been removed. (The fan was so loud that I didnt hear the connection tone) So we have put it together, and connected it to my machine without any need for drivers. However the fan which I originally thought was going to be a plus, ended up being a giant negative. Oh well onto the Vantec.
The Vantec 3.5" enclosure is very similar to the 2.5" enclosure. 
The Harddrive this time screws into a bay, and then that bay fits tightly inside an aluminum enclosure. All you need to do is connect the power and ide cable to the harddrive, screw the drive into the bay, connect the front LED panel, then screw the slide the bay into the case. Then connect the Power and USB cables and you are done. As with the 2.5" drive, if it is a new harddrive you will need to format and partition it as you see fit.
Notes about the vantec enclosure
Although at first I was concerned about the enclosure not having a fan, as 3.5" drives are notorious for getting hot. I found that the aluminum case acts as a heatsink and keeps the drive reletively cool, even under some pretty intense writing sessions. I definetly preferred the Vantec case over the Neo: The styling, size and of course the front LED is pretty sweet. But you have to remember that the cost is nearly DOUBLE that of the neo. I ran SiSoft Sandra on all four enclosures to see if there was any type of speed differences between not only the formfactors, but the enclosures themselves. I found that all 4 enclosures (which were all USB2.0) had essentially the same performance. If I were to replace the fan in the Neo it would definetly be ok as the the case was well made -- and it performed well.
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Last Updated ( Tuesday, 22 November 2005 )
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Computer Components 
