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Though I don't exactly know when this story of mine will appear in PC Magazine, I would guess that my write-up on creating your own external hard drive from a bare enclosure and bare drive should appear in print sometime in a November or December 2005 issue. So in anticipation of the questions stemming from this, here's the stuff I bought for my enclosure, and why.
First, my goals for this drive. I have Macs and PCs in my office, so I have a combination of both USB2 and FireWire ports to deal with. I need a drive for backing up systems with Norton Ghost, transferring huge video files between recording systems and burning systems, and very occasionally bringing very large files to a client to work on them. This drive will not be on 24/7, but when it is on, it will be transferring huge amounts of data. I'm also trying to cheap it out.
For a drive that's on 24/7, I almost always pick something from Seagate these days. Though not as absolutely totally fast as some other manufacturers, they are usually a little quieter and cooler. Even better, they all come with a five-year warranty, rather than a chintzy one-year warranty. That said, this drive won't be on for 24/7, so I'm willing to go with any major drive manufacturer. My local CompUSA had 160 GB drives (8MB cache, 7200RPM) for $100, but with two $30 rebates, the final price was only $40. Perfect.
For drive enclosures, maximum portability is not a concern, but heat dissipation is. I've used many enclosures in the past made of cheap stamped steel and then sheathed in a "stylish" plastic shell, and the damn things get red-hot to the touch after just a few minutes of intense data transfer. Even if they do have a tiny, noisy, irritating fan to "cool" them. No, what you want is a case made mostly of bare aluminum and with a good-sized fan. Bare aluminium radiates heat from the drive into the open air, and a large fan can spin quietly yet still move a nice quantity of air. And since we're inventing the perfect enclosure, you also want one that has an AC power adapter that doesn't block other jacks on your power strip, and yet plugs into the drive any old which way. (Adapters that look like an S-Video cable, complete with lots of tiny pins in the jack, drive me nuts.)
Fortunately, there is just such an enclosure out there, and it is well-built and pretty inexpensive. You want the Venus DS3, from AMS electronics, and that's what I went with. There are two versions out there: one with USB2 only ($37 from Newegg.com), and one with both USB2 and FireWire ports ($54 from Newegg.com). Both have a nice, low-speed 80mm fan that moves a good amount of air quietly, and I can assure you that even after moving 100 GB of data through it, drives remain only slightly warm. It is also a joy to assemble, with lots of metal-to-metal connections and no internal wires to tangle up. The internal electronics are of high-quality too.
So there you go; that's the drive I built for myself for this article. Net price for 160GB in the best enclosure on the market: under $100 after rebate. You can't beat that.
