Photo © Coyote Moon Inc.

Recently, my wife told me that she needs more storage space for her iMac. I could have just installed a larger internal hard drive, but for some reason, the thought of having her iMac torn apart didn’t appeal to her. I tried to reassure her (“No, really, I will be able to put your iMac back together again. By the way, have you seen my hammer?”), but she wasn’t going for it.

So, I hatched a new plan: Build an external hard drive. External hard drives are simple to make, and in this case, it allowed me to repurpose a hard drive from one of our desktop Macs, which we upgraded last year.

Mary now has an external hard drive sitting next to her iMac, connected by FireWire. She decided to use the external drive primarily as a Time Machine backup volume, which gives her both peace of mind and a bit more room for all her projects.

Have you seen my hammer?