Harddrive Repurposing and Relocation Initiative

80GB of harddrive isn't much these days, even in a laptop.
So, it was time for an upgrade(1/2TB fit nicely).

The down side being, now I had a 2.5" Harddrive, with no laptop to use it.
With 256GB thumbdrives, and multi-terabyte external harddrives... these was no reason to put this in a case, as an external.

So what to do?
Increase desktop storage.
But 2.5" drives don't fit in normal desktop cases.
So here's how I fix-d-it.

Step 1: Get Your Stuff Together

First, get yourself one of these pretty, hopefully free 2.5" sata harddrive.
Next, grab a broken 3.5" harddrive. Any capacity will work. Ide(pata), Sata, Scsi even MFM will work.
I used an old IDE Seagate that had developed terminal errors.

Step 2: Dissassemble the 3.5" Drive

Each drive will be different, in little ways, but most follow these general steps.

If my pictures don't work for you, there are plenty of 'ibles explaining the process :-)

Step 3: Blueprint or Kludge. the Choice Is Yours.

Now that you have the bare aluminum drive porting, you can either measure and layout the hole pattern from a pattern/blueprint, or Kludge through like I did.

Step 4: My Kludge Layout

Paper, pencil and Sharpie. Simple.

Step 5: Drilling

When drilling the holes, make them slightly oversized.
This allows for a little bit of fudging, if you don't drill exactly center.
Keeps the screws from binding.