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by James Avery.
Original Post: Laptop Hard Drive enclosure
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A couple weeks ago my HP laptop croaked on me, and I refuse to pay half the cost of the original hardware to fix it. (Money better spent on a tablet in the future). So I was stuck with a broken laptop which happened to contain a hard drive with tons of essential data on it. My first instinct was to drop it in one of my other two laptops, but for some reason XP would not start in the other laptops. (even Safe Mode)
The solution was to pick up this device called a "Portable 2.5" External Enclosure". Basically it is a little device that you drop the 2.5" HDD into, and then you can read and write to it using just your USB port. Now, I know what you are saying... I could have picked up any number of cheaper devices to get the data off of this hard drive. The benefit of this thing is that after I got my data off of the hard drive I can now use this drive as a way to backup data from my laptop. It works off of USB power and can run at USB 2.0 speeds. (I only have 1.1 now though) I prefer something like this because I can easily upgrade or replace the hard drive independently of the rest of the device, as opposed to an all in one device.
I can't find the exact product that I bought online, but it was something like this.