IT'SNEARLY2008,ANDNEARLY ALLPCSAREMULTIMEDIA these days. Though not everyone's PC harbors hundreds of downloaded movies, even the most workaholic business traveler has a few tunes for the road on his laptop. And ifit's not Hollywood movies and music taking up room on your system, then it's personal photos and videos that are multiplying faster than bees around your picnic lunch.

No longer constrained by the limitations of film, the average vacationer takes hundreds of snapshots or hours of video without thinking about where it will all be stored. Eventually, inevitably, you will run out of space and be faced with two options: Delete your precious memories and purchased content or upgrade your storage options. One quick and relatively easy way to get more room is to build an external hard drive. It is a great time to build one because hard drive memory is really cheap right now. We found a Western Digital 750GB drive for only Rs.lO,OOO. So, really, the only thing stopping you from doing this is time and a trip to Fry's. Here's how to do it, and how to maximize the speed of that drive with a quick internal upgrade.

INSTALL THE PCI ESATA CARD
This card gives our PC an external SATA port-which notably uses cables that differ from standard internal SATA connectors. Place the card in a spare PCI Express slot and install the drivers. At 3 gigabits per second, eSATA is significantly faster than USB 20's 480 Mbps or FireWire's 400 Mbps.

FIND THE RIGHT ENCLOSURE
We chose the Antec VERIS MX-l because of its style and versatility; the USB 2.0 output offers backward compatibility, while SATA brings high speed. The MX-l comes with a built-in cooling fan to keep our 750GB WD Caviar hard drive running quietly and safely.

OPEN THE ENCLOSURE
Take a Phillips-head screwdriver and open
up the enclosure, mak¬ing sure to keep track
of where you put your screws. Inside you'll see a printed circuit board (PCB) with the interface adapter.



INSERT THE HARD DRIVE
Remove the two screws that hold the cooling tray in the enclosure and then unplug the wires for the hard disk activity LED and fan. Once this is done, slide the SATA power interface into the hard drive and screw the drive to the tray.

DO SOME EASY WIRING
Don't forget to reattach the LED and fan cables before screwing everything back together and sealing the drive.

CLOSE UP THE CASE
Slide the tray, now with the hard drive attached, back into the enclosure.

FORMAT THE HARD DRIVE
Plug in the drive, turn it on, and launch the Logical Disk Manager by right-clicking My Computer and selecting Manage. Select Disk Management from the Storage section. From here you can format and partition your drive.

THE FINAL PROJECT
In the time it takes to mow the lawn, you've added almost a terabyte of storage to your PC! Now start saving multimedia files.