Make Use of Your Old Hard Drives.

Do Not Throw or Give Away Your Old Hard Drives.

Have you got any old hard drives hanging about or even an old PC or laptop that you don’t use any more and have wondered what to do with these items?

First of all, you should never give them away or sell them to anyone even if you have wiped the hard drive, because you will never know where they will end up. If you pass your old PC to friends or family they could eventually give it to the local jumble sale etc, and your data could still be recoverable.

There are plenty of PC data recovery programs and experts in data recovery about and this is one way that hackers could get hold of your data. To make sure that you stay safe and if you are sure that you do want to keep your old hard disks or the data that is on them, physically destroy them with a hammer and drop them in a bucket of water before throwing.

Turn Your Old Hard Disk into an External Storage Device.

On the other hand, you could make use of your old hard drives and turn them into an external storage device that you can use to keep your precious photographs and documents or any other data that you wish to keep.

To do this you first need to remove the old hard drive from your PC by opening up the case, locating the drive and then disconnect the power and data cables and undo any screws that are holding the drive to the pc chassis.

Once the disk is removed from the PC you can then dispose of the rest of the PC as you wish, all of your data is stored on the hard disk. The rest of the PC is no use so you can give it away, or if completely knackered you can dispose of it responsibly.

You will then need to invest in a hard drive caddy or enclosure. These are inexpensive and are very simple to use. First of all, you need to determine the type of enclosure that you need to fit your drive.

If you have a 3.5-inch mechanical hard disk with Serial ATA or SATA connection then you will need a caddy that will correspond to this specification. The caddy will connect to your PC via USB and has a separate power supply.

To fit the drive to the caddy it is simply a matter of removing a cover from the caddy and pugging the hard disk on to the locating plugs and replacing the cover, although this may vary depending on the make of caddy that you have bought.

You then simply plug the caddy into the mains and the USB lead into an appropriate USB socket on your pc and switch it on. You will hear the disk spin up and a new device will be detected by windows.

After you have plugged your hard drive caddy into your PC, if you open the file explorer you will see the new drive as listed, mine is shown here as ‘Arkive Disk (L:)’. You can see all the folders that are present on the disk, by going to the properties you will also be able to tell how much free storage space you have left and in the disk management of your PC you can see the disk and even change the drive letter if you so desire.

In the screenshot above you can see the size of the drive and that it is healthy so it is ready for you to store any data that you so desire on it.

Now you can see how you can make use of your old hard disks and turn them into an external storage drive on a budget. If you have any questions or comments about this post please feel free to post them in the box below.