DIY SATA USB CABLE

[mahyar e]

Is it possible to use your old desktop SATA cable and HDD and turn it into an external Hard Drive for a laptop? I have been looking at the cable for an hour, it costs $10 to buy one. But the excitement of building one is priceless. How would you go about doing this?

 

[Paperdoc]

Not quite that simple. The SATA 7-wire data cable carries data only, and NO power for the HDD. So you'd have to find a way to provide that power.

The simple way, though, is to buy the appropriate external drive enclosure and install the old HDD in it. In buying an external enclosure, you need to pay attention to four things:

1. HDD form factor - is your old HDD a common 3½" internal drive, or a smaller 2½" unit from a laptop? Get an enclosure for your size - some are available to handle both sizes, if you need that.

2. The internal interface - what your HDD plugs into. In your case, it must be SATA. Most enclosures support SATA II (more properly, SATA 3.0 Gb/s), although you can get ones for SATA 6.0 Gb/s. However, your old HDD probably is not the newest SATA 6.0. Besides, even the HDD's that are rated for SATA 6.0 Gb/s cannot exceed the 3.0 spec in performance, so a SATA 3.0 enclosure should be just fine. If your old HDD is plain original SATA (1.5 Gb/s) it will still work in such an enclosure.

3. External interface - the way the enclosure connects to the computer. Find out which port(s) your laptop has available - could be USB2, USB3, Firewire (aka IEEE 1394a), Firewire 800 (aka IEEE1394b), or eSATA. USB2 is very common, but is the slowest of these. The fastest is Firewire 800 (IEEE1394b), but it is not common on laptops. eSATA is SATA but altered for external connections - allows longer connecting cables and Hot Swapping. Choose an enclosure that has the interface you want to use. Many come with two or three ways to connect, but you only use one at a time. Mine has both USB2 and eSATA - I use the eSATA to my computer because it's faster, but I could use USB2 on just about any machine, it's so common. Whatever you choose, you'll need a connection cable, so check whether the enclosure comes with one.

4. Power supply. Many "laptop enclosures" claim to provide power to the HDD inside just through the data cable connecting to the computer, but this has 2 problems. First off, if you're going to use the eSATA connection system, it does not have any way to send power to the enclosure. But more importantly, most desktop 3½" HDD's draw too much power to use a common USB2 or Firewire port for their power supply. (If you have a true USB3 port connection system, that can provide the power needed.) So usually the better bet is to get an enclosure that includes its own power supply - could be internal in the enclosure, or a small "power brick" that plugs into it. This solves your power supply needs.

A fifth consideration - not critical, but you can choose - is whether the enclosure has a cooling fan. A fan does keep the temperature of the enclosed device down, and should be used with something like an optical drive. But many HDD's don't generate much heat, and something simpler like a close-fitting metal case can dissipate it well enough. Personally, I worry that a fan will wear out, so I bought a fanless metal enclosure and a Seagate 500 GB 3½" HDD 5 years ago and the system works just fine.