Hard Drive How-To: The Ultra External Hard Disk Enclosure

By John Gawley on June 6th, 2007

Taking a hard drive with you has never been easier. Today there are a veritable cornucopia of removable, movable, totable, sharable data storage products. You can even get your hands on high-capacity flash media, which makes hefting a hard drive out and about almost unnecessary. But for most serious PC applications, a traditional disc-based hard drive is the best solution.

But what if you’ve got to move more information than is convenient to do so? Or if you run out of room on your installed hard drive, but don’t want to swap out the old one? You’ll need an External hard drive, and there’s no better way to extensive storage capacity than to use an 3.5-Inch drive in a portable stand-alone enclosure. And we just happen to have an inexpensive and reliable hard drive enclosure from Ultra right here in the TigerTV Labs.

The Ultra External Hard Disk Enclosure houses an IDE hard drive inside a sturdy case that provides a power off/on switch, USB port, and two FireWire connections. It also sports a 40mm fan to keep your drive cool during extended data transfer sessions or large file downloads. The extra FireWire port also allows you to daisy chain the Ultra External Hard Disk Enclosure together with similar devices. It comes with plenty of instructions—but you won’t need those! Not with this handy how-to put together by TigerTV host Logan. Check it out, and then go get one (or three) at TigerDirect.com!