Is it possible to make your own external HDD?

[leglez]

I am wanting to make something similar to THIS. I am a fairly decent Metal and Plastic worker. If I made my own enclosure that could fit like 5 HDDs in it and then got some of THESE. Could I wire all of the USB ends together and then have one USB wire coming out of the enclosure so that you only had to plug that in and the power? Also would Windows recognize it as 1HDD or 5HDDs?

 

[AmphibSailor]

Instead of wiring the USB ends together, you would probably want to use a small USB hub. You would have to figure out how to power the drives though. Each one of the Rosewill adapters is set up with power, but I'm betting that they use 110v AC and a transformer. (Could probably use the 12v HDD molexs or 12v SATA power connectors on your PC p/s instead, though...)

Each HDD would be recognized individually if you put them all on the USB bus.

 

[xylem]

It could be done with a USB hub, but you'd be restricting the total bandwidth between the 5 drives and your computer to the capability of a single (presumably) USB 2.0 connection... bursts of 40-50 MB/s (not a sustained rate).