How can I use my hard drives outside of my PC (HD enclosures only way?)

E

Emper0r

Member
Right now we are in a situation where we want to keep our hard drives at home so we can stream our personal photos and movies through our network and Xbox 360. However, we are moving the PC into a new office (while keeping a laptop for home use). I recently ordered this Hard Drive enclosure:

Vantec NexStar TX 2.5-Inch SATA to USB 2.0 External Hard Drive Enclosure

http://www.amazon.com/Vantec-NexSta...NXZC/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1329711187&sr=8-1

Needles to say, the enclosure is much too small to fit our 500 GB Seagates, but I figured it could run the drive fine without being in the case. So I plugged in the SATA connector and IDE power connector into one of our 500 GB Seagates then connected the USB cable to our laptop. The drive would not power on, and of course as a result would not be read by our laptop.

Am I missing something? It seems to connect to the SATA and power ports just fine. Is it possible it's just a defective enclosure? Also, does anyone have a more elegant solution for streaming our movies and photos other than having to connect the drives to our laptop each time we want to watch anything?

Thank you to anyone for help!
 
Voyager, thanks so much for setting me on the right track. Well shoot, now I have two laptop hard drive enclosures. Well, I suppose I'll keep one and sell the other, eh? Cheers!

voyagerfan99 said:
From what it sounds like, you're trying to run a desktop drive from a laptop drive enclosure. In that case, the power requirements aren't sufficient because laptop drives require significantly less power when used externally then desktop drives do.

You need an enclosure like this: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817173042
Click to expand...
 
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