How to: Make Your Own External Hard Drive

Once upon a time, a princess and a frog prince went to the Micro Center to buy an external hard drive, to keep the holy MacBook Pro files backed up via Time Machine. But the prince, who ruled the kingdom of Do-It-Yourself and the duchy of You-Can-Get-That-For-Less, advised the princess to forget about paying $129.99+ for 500GB, and make her own external hard drive. So the princess, next in line to the throne of Okay-Honey-Whatever-You-Say, bought an enclosure.

You will need:

• a hard drive* ($59.99, now $99.99 because of the flooding in Thailand, home of hard drives)
• screwdriver
• 3.5" SATA to USB 2.0 enclosure ($15.99 on sale!)

*Boyfriend would like to make it known that he donated the hard drive, meaning I paid $0.**
**Note to self: do not blog while Boyfriend is peering over shoulder.

Step 1: 

Insert the hard drive into the enclosure.

Remember when you were a kid and had the game where you put the square blocks into the square holes and the round blocks into the round holes? Same thing, but with ~1 mm rectangular slits. Make sure to jam it in there tight.

Step 2:

Screw the hard drive into the enclosure.

Flip it over; the screws are at the bottom of the enclosure.

Step 3:

Screw the back panel into place.

Really? I have to explain this? Come on.

The following steps are optional:

Step 4:

Discover that enclosure doesn't work.

Step 5:

Have Boyfriend fix the problem by using his external hot-swap bay enclosure.

Step 6:

Take nap.

Step 7:

Return busted enclosure and pat self on back for job well done.

In other news: Boyfriend's cat tried to get into the shower with me. Perv.