Make Your Own 120 GB Portable Hard Drive in Less than Rs. 2500

Portable storage technology has evolved abruptly in recent couple of years. As Chinese products jumped into local market, high capacity flash drives have become very much common.

I still remember when, for the first time, I saw someone using flash drive; back then I actually didn’t know what it was (2002 or 2003 I think). And now every Tom, Dick and Harry has got a flash drive.

Talking about hard drives and flash drives, external storage of high capacity in lesser cost is still what everyone wants. And here we got a desi method of getting a portable drive of our own, with affordable price tag.

Making Your Own Portable Drive:

This method comes handy for those who have plans to shift from rotating media drive to SSD (solid state disk) or bigger hard drives. Here are things you gonna need!

Things you need:

One used 120GB rotating media 2.5” (laptop’s) hard drive Average price is approximately Rs. 2000.
Portable hard drive case that comes equipped with a USB 2.0 pin attached. Average Price range is Rs. 250 to Rs. 800

It takes less than a minute or so to fix your hard drive in the case and you are about to make a portable drive of your own in couple of minutes.

P.S. Portable hard drive case will have data and power pins, simply plug them in with the hard drive and you are done.

(Pictures attached at the end of the post will help you to setup)

Advantages:

Very much cost effective, as 16GB USB flash drive will cost you around 2000 and using this method you can create your own 120GB portable USB drive (not available in market in this size).
It works the same way as any other USB drive, i.e. plug and play.
Another feature that it incorporates is, you can have your partitions intact. As in case of flash drives and memory cards, your computer reads only first active partition but here all partitions will work.
Very fast data transfer speed as compared to flash drive (v2.0)
Can be used as a backup drive for large data.
Larger storage capacity.

Disadvantages:

Bigger in size as compared to flash drive.
Vibrations, that may increase if fitting is loose.
Rotating media inside, so you have to be careful while in operation and movement.

Please note that I am in no way comparing this drive with flash drives, nor promoting it in anyway over flash drives. Yet these drives come handy when you consider size to cost ratio. Moreover you have to be careful about purchasing used hard drive from market – make sure it’s in good working condition with no bad sectors on it.

Following are the pictures that may help you in getting the idea more clear.