The demand for external hard drives has increased significantly in recent years, due to the need for more storage space and the added security from backing up data. A 500GB hard drive can be bought for as little as 35 and so pairing this with an external hard drive enclosure is a cheap way of protecting your data. The benefit of a hard drive enclosure over a pre-builtexternal hard drive is that you can use one the old hard drives you may have lying around.