I've been looking at getting an external hard drive to help me back up my data from my main hard drive. I was thinking about buying a "pre-made" USB 2.0 external hard drive, one of the Western Digital ones but I was thinking about picking up a cheap hard drive and putting it in a enclosure and hooking it up, but if I was to buy a SATA or IDE hard drive what's the best way to connect it?

Does the enclosure have cables or connections that you plug the hard drive into and then you can user a USB cable?

Any advice?

Yes, the enclosures include all necessary cables (at least the two I bought did). I took out the HDs from my old computer and put them into two different enclosures, one USB2.0 and the other Firewire.

For some reason the USB one isn't recognized on boot, so it doesn't do me much good; I have to unplug it and then plug it back in several times before it's recognized. The Firewire drive works great though, and I think it's a little faster than the USB one.

I don't know if the USB problems are related to the computer, the cabling of the enclosure, or the drive itself but I'm concerned enough to troubleshoot it. I mostly keep it as an extra drive for my laptop.

If you can, try to find an enclosure that doesn't require a separate power brick. It will make life a lot easier.

This is quite a common problem with XP - you just need to go into Disk Management and you'll see it there. Swap the drive letters with your optical drive(s) and you shouldn't have anymore problems after that.

It's very much the same situation some experience with Pendrives.

Thanks for the help, but I don't use XP. I'm using a Mac.

I've noticed that I get have a short in the "backplane" when I hook up my headphones so there could be some issues w/ the hardware of my system.

I noticed that I missed a word in my original post. I'm NOT concerned enough to mess with it. I have my Firewire drive that works great and still has plenty of room so I'm not worried about the second drive for now. I mostly bought the enclosure since I had the second drive anyways.

i would say just buy a premade on from ebuyer.com as yiu can get a 500GB from just £90