How to convert a portable external hard disk into an internal hard disk (Western Digital 500GB)

I have a Western Digital My Book Essential 500GB USB 2.0 3.5" External Hard Drive and it is only used as storage device for my installers in my internet cafe. I have them in a portable hard disk so that it would be easy to install them in many computers.

I am not installing that frequent anymore and the portable hard disk is just sitting pretty inside the box. The time I planned to build an Intel Quad Core PC, I decided not to buy a new hard drive and just use the portable hard drive instead.

The WD My Book contains 500GB of space, which is enough for me, and it runs at 7200rpm with 16MB cache. It is just on SATA II but the capacity and cache will not bottleneck my quad core built. This hard disk would be great for my build and an extra saving for me.

How could you convert it into an internal drive?

If you have a My Book or a portable external hard disk and you are not using it that much, you can actually convert it to an internal disk and boost your desktop storage and even data transfer speed (if you have a much better model).

Remove the outer casing

There are no screws on My Book, so the best way to remove the casing is to use a flat screw and slowly slide the cover out of the inner casing. You might produce scratches on the plastic but it is OK until you do not break anything.

Remove the inner casing

Remove the screws and carefully remove the connector of the SATA and power supply. In My Book, it is a circuit board. After removing anything that is attached to the hard disk, you can now see the plain fat hard disk just like the hard disk you have in your desktop computer.

How to connect it to the desktop computer?

Treat it as an ordinary hard disk and connect it with a SATA cable to the motherboard. You need also an extra SATA power supply cable to power up your hard disk. You might need to reformat the hard disk in order to use it. You must see the new hard disk in your BIOS utility and on Windows Explorer. Be sure the computer recognizes the maximum storage capacity of the disk. If not, go to Computer Management, delete partition, create new volume (use all space), and finally format it. Use Windows 7 to do this in order to get great results.