beliskner_thor

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Oct 12, 2006
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okay i looked around on the forums for about 10 mins for somthing on this and couldn't find anything that answered my question directly, so if there is a topic on this already just point me to it.

i was looking at getting an external hard drive, at first i was looking at getting just a package, but then i thought jeeze i can prolly get just the components for cheeper.

anyways my question was if you buy just an external enclosure and a hard drive, how would you go about formatting the hard drive so that it would be able to be moved from computer to computer easily.

im new to the computer building scene so please dont rip on me if this is common knowlege.

and if you curious these are the components i picked out:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?item=N82E16822144408

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?item=N82E16817145162
 

Doughbuy

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Jul 25, 2006
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Heh, lucky I saw this since I'm running 6 External HDD's right now. I have 4 CoolMax, 1 Bytecc, and 1 Penguin gear. Anyways...

I don't see why you want the RE edition of Western Digital, but you should still go with the SATA version. Here is a nice cheap SATA/IDE enclosure which works fine:

http://www.directron.com/me835isablack.html

This will then allow you to get a SATA HDD:

http://www.directron.com/wd3200ys.html

Which in the future, if you want to put this in your system won't cause problems if there are no more IDE slots.
 

Doughbuy

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Just stick them in the enclosure, plug it into your comp, and turn it on. Your computer will recognize the mass storage device, install drivers, yadda yadda yadda. Then go into computer management, go to disk management, and then you should see the HDD right there. Assign it a drive letter if you want, and then format it however you want. Same as every other drive.

Hope that helps
 

FireWire2

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First look at your computer and see what port (bus) that your computer offers:
I will list it in order of speed:
USB2.0 Slow and relative easy to use
1394a - faster than USB but more cost
1394b - faster then 1394a and cost even more
eSATA - king of the speed 3.0Gb can configre RAID with multiple drives

Install and format is pretty easy!