Turn your OLD Hard Drive into an External Drive!

02:24 Gadgets , Hardware 0 Comments

Once you upgrade your PC and replace old stuff that includes a Hard Drive too, what do you think will you do with that old hard drive? Let the dust find a new place? Toss it in the trash? No! What if you realized that you could actually turn that thing into a real EXTERNAL DRIVE which you could plug in your PC using the USB port or the Fire Wire interface? Yes you really can! It can serve up like you can move large files from one PC to another, back up data, rescue files from an unbootable drive, and, of course, expand your available storage space. It can also act as a holding tank for your data while you perform a hard-drive wipe and OS reinstall! So lets get started how you actually can do all this stuff.

                    Picture Courtesy: Lifehacker.com

Enclosure:

A 3.5 inch enclosure

First of all you must know that everything needs a home to live. Similarly a hard drive needs an enclosure too. A small case that supplies power, protection and a USB or FireWire interface is all you need, and, obviously the old hard drive. These enclosures can be bought up from Newgg.com for about $10 - $50. Now another sexy thing to know is that you can also turn your NOTEBOOK's hard drive into an external one too. Consider this thing when buying an enclosure that if you have a notebook's hard drive, then you need a 2.5-inch enclosure. Whereas desktop drives require a 3.5-inch enclosure.
Most enclosures are designed to work with IDE drives and supply a USB and/or Fire Wire external interface for connecting to your PC. However, some enclosures support newer SATA drives and include an eSATA interface—though not many PCs or notebooks have that kind of port. Thus, if you're relocating a SATA drive, make sure the enclosure includes a USB interface so you'll have a place to connect it. Remember an IDE connector measures about two inches wide and has two rows of pins; SATA connectors are much smaller and have only one row. This is all you need to know about buying an enclosure.

Installing the Drive:

Connecting the Drive:

If you purchased an enclosure for a 3.5-inch drive, it comes with an external power supply. Plug it in and power up the enclosure; you should hear the drive spin up (and see a little LED activity if the enclosure has LEDs). Notebook-drive enclosures are usually powered by their USB or FireWire connections, so no external adapter is necessary. Plug the enclosure into your PC's USB, FireWire, or eSATA port. Mac and Windows XP/Vista systems should automatically detect the drive and load any necessary drivers. (Probably same goes for the Windows 7,8 and 10). Once you're done, you are ready to go.

Connecting a 2.5 inch laptop hard disk to a USB port

When on Windows, do not unplug the drive when something is being copied or deleted from the drive. Doing so will surely harm it.Mac users can eject the drive by dragging it to the Trash or Cmd-clicking and choosing "Eject" as usual; Windows users should click the Safely Remove Hardware icon in the System Tray, then choose the "Safely remove USB mass storage device" letter that corresponds to your external drive.