How would i work a hard drive enclosure with laptop?

[aznman]

i have a spare, unopened 80 gig maxtor harddrive 7200 rpm 8 mb cache. If i buy an enclosure, what steps to i need to take to start using it?Load OS?Yatta yatta? and when i do, is it going to run like a normal HD at the set 7200 rpm 8cache speed? thanks u all in advance

 

[UglyCasanova]

I guess just format it and go. You would not need to load an OS on there.

 

[Mellman]

as ugly said, your not running your OS on the firewire drive. (or usb2) you just dont do things that way...but it will give you more storage

 

[aznman]

hey thx u guys!

 

[whuang]

If you are not planning to boot from that Hard drive just format it and go .

If you want to boot from a extrenal drive (the hard drive in the enclosure) then you need
to make sure that your Bios allows you to boot from a extrenal device (eg. USB).
In this case you will also need to install an os in that HD (Hard Drive).you will also need to disable
any other hard drives that has a OS installed, every time you want to use the extrenal drive.
running 2 hdd with 2 O/S (e.g. windows O/S) will cause the 2 O/S to conflict (you will need to reinstall both drives and will probably loose data).

Try here for a HDD enclosure.
USB 2.0 3.5" Hard Drive Enclosure with Aluminum case