External Hard Drive Combination
Hey All - I am trying to find a solution to what seems to be a simple issue. I have 4 external hard drives ranging from a 640g Maxtor to a 2g WD and they are all 3.5". I would like to find a case or make a case that would handle all the drives in one box. I would also like to take them from their respective external cases so I do not have to buy new HDD. Is this safe to do and how hard would it be overall? Any ideas on a case for all the drives? I don't need to have RAID but if that is the only way, then I can make it work. Thanks for the help!
Comments
Just take the drives apart, inside you'll find a standard HDD, and a circuit board for the interface controller.
You can then remount these parts in any enclosure you care to "engineer" for them. The trick will be making sure it's adequately cooled and combining the power to a single transformer, rather than having 4 separate power cords coming out of it... but easy enough if you know what you're doing.
Easier would be to buy a 4-bay "dock" for HDD's... made to just plug a bare drive into. These generally only support newer SATA drives though... if your drives use the older "flat ribbon cable" connector (ATA?), you'll be stuck designing your own box.