| Hard Drive Enclosures are getting increasingly popular, | | | | to use that same hard disk to create a new back-up |
| which, given their cost and ease of use is not | | | | solution. By doing this you get real cost benefits |
| surprising. Enclosures are a great way to re-use on old | | | | combined with a sense of satisfaction that you are |
| or salvaged hard disk drive from a computer and | | | | re-cycling what would otherwise be a scrapped piece |
| whilst these older hard drives are always as large as | | | | of hardware. |
| the current models (in terms of storage capacity) | | | | If you are using an IDE or ATA Hard Disks with an |
| it’s a real shame not to use them | | | | enclosure then it’s important that you set the |
| By way of example a salvaged 120GB hard disk drive | | | | jumper settings on the disk to “master” and not |
| will hold up to 30,000 songs, 150 hours of video, or | | | | cable select or slave. If the jumper setting is incorrectly |
| 25,000 photos and the old work file of course! So | | | | set then the hard disk will not be recognised when |
| even at the rate that people are saving files today | | | | connected to the PC. The default setting when |
| that’s still a huge amount of information that the | | | | removing a hard disk from a PC is not always master |
| hard drive is capable of storing. | | | | and whilst it seems logical that any disk installed in an |
| Hard drive enclosures will of course support new hard | | | | external enclosure is set to “salve” but it does |
| disks as well as any salvaged hard disks you happen | | | | need to be set to “master”. |
| to have lying around at home or work. If you do use | | | | Changing the jumper settings is easy to do and only |
| an enclosure with a new hard disk then you could | | | | takes a few seconds. Typically the hard disk |
| install a 1.5TB hard disk into the enclosure and create a | | | | manufacturers will have put a label on the top of the |
| very substantial back-up solution | | | | hard disk illustrating how you set the jumpers. |
| For most people though the real benefit of an | | | | Jumpers are just metal pins that have small black |
| enclosure is that it allows the recovery of data from a | | | | plastic sleeves that slot on them. |
| hard disk taken out of an old PC and it then allows you | | | | |