Re-Using External Hard Drive Enclosure?
 

I have a couple of external hard drive enclosures with dead hard drives. The original drives are 2GB and 3 GB. Can I simply buy a bare drive of the same size (3.5") and interface (SATA) and not any larger (in TB), replace the dead drive, and use the external enclosure again? Or is there sneaky tech in there that makes it more complicated?

yes, if you are sure they use the same interface (SATA)

you'll save nearly a dollar by doing this!

why not move up to IDE? or even USB 3?

You can reuse them.

Nothing fancy inside.

Capacity does not matter, slap in whatever matches the interface.

My idea was more about not throwing away the old enclosures. But I see that they sell external hard drives for essentially the same price as the bare drives. Hmm.

Go big. Those enclosures don't care about the size of the hard drive. (But like you said, there is no financial gain in saving the enclosures) Take 'em to goodwill and enjoy a little tax break.

This

I even use one at work that I don't have the external enclosure for ... just the connectors

By the way, having just experienced yet another drive failure, I want to remind everyone to back up back up back up.

RAID-1 and backup here :)

they have 1TB toshiba external drives on newegg for $49 today. i picked one up to use as my backup drive. :)

I don't buy anything but 3TB WD Caviar Black or Red NAS drives. Buy some, put them in the enclosures and you're all set!