Ok, so you recognize what a fantastic bargain today’s deal of the day is and you want to go about building your own external hard drive.  The only problem is, you have no idea how.  Guess what—it’s easy!  Now, I’m not going to say it’s so easy a caveman could do it—cavemen may well have lacked the necessary fine motor skills.  Luckily, 50,000 years worth of evolution has made you many times better at everything than some jerk wearing an antelope skin, so let’s get started!

After your Airlink101 HDD enclosure arrives, your first step is going to be getting your hands on a hard drive.  I recommend pulling one out of an old desktop PC, but you can purchase a new one if you’d prefer.  Today’s daily deal is made for 3.5 in. hard discs, which is the standard size for desktop PCs.  Be sure that the hard disc you select is SATA compatible—that means it uses a newer flat interface connector instead of the old-school 40-pin connectors.  If you aren’t sure what you’ve got, run a Google image search for “SATA” and see if your disc matches the picture.

Now you’re ready to built this sucker.  Open the Airlink101 enclosure, connect the drive to the internal interface and power-supply plugs, and secure it using the provided screws.  The enclosure's instructions should walk you through the job no problem. 

Once everything is screwed into place, plug in the enclosure’s power cord into a wall outlet and plug its USB cable into your computer.  Unless you’re running Windows 98 or something, your computer should automatically detect the new drive.  Not bad, right?  If you are running Windows 98, please get back inside your time machine and leave us future folks alone.

Now it’s time to try to access the external drive.  If you’ve repurposed an old hard disc, it may be good to go.  Just click over to My Computer and see if it works.  If you can’t access the drive or if you’re using a brand new hard disc, you’ll need to format it.  If you’re running Windows XP, open the Start button, right-click My Computer, and click on “Manage.” Under the Storage section, click Disk Management, then look to the right-hand pane for your new drive—it should be the one with the black bar next to it. Right-click that bar, and select New Partition. This will launch the New Partition wizard, which will take you through formatting and partitioning the new drive. The process is the same in Windows Vista if you choose Classic View within Control Panel; otherwise, access the utility via Control Panel > "Create and format hard disk partitions."

Formatting a hard disc drive takes a while, so feel free to read “War and Peace” or watch “The Big Lebowski” again while your computer works.

Once the formatting is complete, congrats, you’ve got a new external hard drive!  Wasn’t even that hard was it?  And hey, assuming you used an old hard disc, it only cost you $17.99.  That’s why BuyersHQ.com ain’t to be messed with!