Building External Hard Drive

I plan to buy the Apricorn 420 case and insert a 500GB Seagate or Maxtor Drive. My purpose is to have a flexible way to backup (via image) multiple PCs (win98 to winXP) and to have an alternative storage for audio/picture/video files.

I have built my own computer and this looks like a "piece of cake".

What do I need to look out for ... e.g. drive ventilation; durability/duration of external drives; adaptibility to different operating systems?

Would appreciate any insight or words of wisdom from the experienced.

 

You mentioned Win98 in your post. You need to be aware that Win98 cannot read or write to a NTFS partition, it requires FAT32 or FAT16. With FAT16 you would lose a lot of storage capacity because of overhead if it would even be able to format a drive that size in the first place. Fat32 would be better as far as overhead but again I'm not sure it could handel a 500Gig drive. You may need to create a small FAT32 partition and do the rest with NTFS.

 

I think that is a great enclosure. The main thing you need to worry about with an enclosure is temps. The enclosure is made out of alluminum, compared to plastic, and even has a fan. I don't see anything to be worried about except for what schnerdly said about FAT32 partition size limitations.

 

What is the max partition size for Win98? Given the price of the case, I may consider a small drive just for Win98. Otherwise, I will limit the partition size on the 500GB drive, assuming the FAT32 partition can be read from a bigger drive.

Thanks in advance ...

 

You can setup a FAT32 partition and an NTFS partition on the same drive. I don't know how that would work on an external drive but I know it works on an internal.
I don't remember for sure but I think FAT32 is limited at 15 or 20 Gigs.