What is a laptop hard drive enclosure?
Posted by: Brad
Tags: 1TB USB 3.0 hard drive, hard drive, laptop, laptop hard drive enclosure, notebook, parallel ATA, serial ATA
A laptop hard drive enclosure is a rigid case where you can put a 2.5 inch hard disk drive (HDD). This allows you to use your formally internal drive as an external or portable drive. Enclosures are a great way to utilize any extra hard drives that you might have lying around. Let’s assume that you do, in fact, have an extra laptop HDD that you would like to use as an external drive for your desktop computer. However, you don’t have a suitable enclosure yet. Here are the steps that you can take that will give that old drive a new purpose in life.
First, you need to determine your old hard drive’s type of storage interface. The storage interface is how and where the computer transfers information to and from the hard drive. Newer drives will probably be serial ATA or SATA. If your drive was made before 2007, it probably is a parallel ATA or PATA drive. Your drive will probably have some sort of label indicating what type of drive it is. Parallel ATA used to be referred to as IDE. If your drive is a SATA drive, then you should look for labeling that says Serial ATA or SATA. On the other hand, if you have a PATA drive, the labeling could say Parallel ATA, PATA, IDE, Enhanced IDE, or EIDE.
Those are definitely a lot of options and if you can’t tell what type of drive you have simply by reading the labeling, you might be able to tell by looking at the connector port. The SATA port is a rectangular slot with two plastic tabs, one longer than the other, in it. A PATA connector port is significantly different. This port is also a rectangular slot, but has two rows of metal pins instead.
Next you will need to decide how you will connect the enclosure to your desktop. Once again, there are many options to choose from and this will be determined by what kind of input connections your computer has. A vast major of computers will have USB 2.0 ports. Some computers might have a faster technology known as Firewire. If you purchased your computer in 2010 there is the chance that it came with a port that uses USB 3.0 technology. This technology is even faster than Firewire. If you have this latest piece of tech, then you have the potential of turning that 2.5 inch drive into a very fast 1TB USB 3.0 hard drive. You will be able to take a massive amount of data on the road with you.