Using WD External HD as Internal HD

[EdwardATeller]

Thought I'd post my experience here so it might help someone else. I bought a Western Digital 1TB Essentials Mybook external HD. Wasn't too happy with it as an external drive, so I thought I'd pull the drive out and use it as an internal drive. It had a Green Caviar SATA drive inside, and when I hooked it up to my Vista computer, the BIOS recognized it, but I couldn't get it recognized by Windows.

I ended up putting the enclosure back together, and it works like it did before. I updated the firmware before pulling the drive. Don't know much about this, but maybe this HD has specialized firmware so that you can only use it in a USB enclosure. Maybe explains why it was cheaper than the same size internal WD drive.

[paulbeers]

Did you actaully go in an enable the drive in the Disk Management Utility? I've swapped hard drives in and out of external cases many times (mostly with the portable style that use laptop hard drives) with no issues. You might be experiencing the exception to this rule, but it sounds more like you just needed to enable the drive via Disk Management....

[EdwardATeller]

Thanks! It's working fine now.

[paulbeers]

Originally Posted by EdwardATeller

Thanks! It's working fine now.

Glad to hear you got it to work. I like to buy external drives and pull the hard drives out of them (like you said, they often are cheaper and you get an external drive case that you can later use) so I was hoping we weren't going to start to have to worry about non-compatible firmwares!

[Serra]

I have a couple of these, I've tried a bunch of different enclouses, but I'm only using ones with built in fans now:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...-211-_-Product

A bit on the more expensive side, but well worth it. They are external SATA enclosures, so the system thinks they are internal drives.