I needed additional hard drive space to accommodate all of the digital video data I was importing from my camcorder. I use iMovie to edit then video and the file size of a 70 minute movie was approximately 14 GB! That was taking a sizable bite out of my 75GB internal hard drive! I needed extra disk space fast!
A quick search of Amazon.com will show you that you can purchase a ready-made, 200GB, USB 2.0, external hard drive for around $200.00. That seems pretty outrageous to me. I took things into my own hands and made a feeble attempt at modifying my system. Below is a rough outline of the steps I took to build my own hard drive at half the cost ($100.00).
After burning a completed DVD project, it took ~22 minutes to copy the 14GB iMovie project folder onto the external hard drive. Now I can begin to import all my digital videos immediately, put them on the external drive, and edit them later when time permits.
*Update :: March 28, 2006 - Almost a year later and my little drive is still working great!
*Update :: April 1, 2008 - Three years later and this little guy is still working fine. Only a fool would not consider making their own external HD.
*Update :: January 20, 2010 - Four and a half years later and this little guy is still working fine!
Step 1: Purchase an internal hard drive, $80.00 (Seagate 200 GB, Ultra ATA/100, 72000 rpm, 3.5" shown below)
Step 2: Purchase a hard disk enclosure, $20.00 (Creative I/O, 3.5", Aluminum shown below)
Step 3: Remove rear cover of enclosure and carefully pull out the tray (at center below).
Step 4: Look in the hard drive manual to determine how to configure the hard drive to master (not slave).
Step 5: Mount the hard drive to tray of the enclosure with provided screws.
Step 6: Connect the power connector, IDE connector, and LED connectors.
Step 7: Make sure wires are properly aligned and won't get pinched when closing rear cover and carefully slide tray back into enclosure.
Step 8: Connect the hard drive to a USB 2.0 port on your computer and plug in the AC power source.
Step 9: Power up drive and open the Disk Utility app (Mac OS X below).
Step 10: Partition disk.
Step 11: Enjoy! Notice the hard drive icon mounted to the right of my iMac as a little orange icon.
