Making Portable HDD?

[ColFantastic]

I'm hoping someone can point me in a couple good tutorials on making a portable hdd. Through a series of events, I received a new but opened 250gb Seagate internal laptop drive. Instead of trying to return it to the store sans receipt I figured I would make a portable hdd out of it for either my Wii U or just to have another drive around the house.

My question is, can I just open up a old/broken portable hard drive and swap out the hdd itself as long as the connectors are compatible (they are)? Do I need to do anything special to the drive to make my computer recognize it?

Thanks for any insight you guys can provide.

 

[Link2999]

I use this, should work for you: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B009DNIWKA/ref=wms_ohs_product?ie=UTF8&psc=1

There are other, cheaper options though, either way it's not hard to figure out. It's a 9.5mm right?

Edit: and yes, you can swap the HDD from an enclosure anytime.

 

[ColFantastic]

I use this, should work for you: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B009DNIWKA/ref=wms_ohs_product?ie=UTF8&psc=1

There are other, cheaper options though, either way it's not hard to figure out. It's a 9.5mm right?

Edit: and yes, you can swap the HDD from an enclosure anytime.

Cool thanks. I'm going to try swapping the HDD from an old enclosure first and see how that works. My biggest concern was if I had to prep the drive space in some way.

 

[ColFantastic]

Ok, so I tried swapping the 250 gb drive for an old portable drive, using the original enclosure but my computer won't recognize it as a drive. It will list itself under Device Manager but I can't access the drive itself to format or put anything on it. Did I get a lemon out of the box? Any suggestions?