How to use old HDDs as external drives. Hi, everyone.
Leo, Notenboom here for askleo.com
Today's video is going to be just a little bit different.
I'm going to do a little bit of show and tell for you.
Let's get right to the question first.
"I'm currently using a machine I purchased
used into which I've added in external hard drives.
My wife and I play a lot of games that I downloaded to my external drives.
I have a couple of old computers which have died.
Can I remove the hard drives from these two old broken machines and make them
external hard drive so I can use the information and games on my e machine?
How do I find out what size enclosure to use for this job?"
Yes, yes, you can.
In fact, it's something that I do a lot of myself, especially as drives.
It's funny the drives don't get smaller, but our expectations get bigger.
So the drive that was huge five years ago is now marginally big.
What happens in my house, at least, is that I will
then, as I upgrade my drives, take the old drives and very often put
them into external drive enclosures and then attach them either to the same
machine or a different machine to use them as external drives.
Use them as backup storage or archive
storage or whatever kind of storage makes sense.
Quite often they end up attached to an even an older machine down
in my basement that I think has something like five or six different old drives
connected to it both internal and external.
But it's a great way to use these old drives from the old computers that really
aren't serving you well anymore and put them into use in a different way.
So the first question that always comes up is physical drive sizes.
Now I actually have a couple of them here
and I'll try and show them to you here on screen.
This, for example, is a three and a half inch hard drive.
This is actually taken from a laptop.
You'll see that this size is very common for laptops.
And as we'll talk about in a minute, SSDs, the interface here that we're looking at,
this row of pins is the standard SATA interface that you'll
find has wires or ribbon connectors to it when you remove it from the old computer.
In the case of a laptop,
it will often just sort of plug right into those connectors and make the connection.
The other size that you're likely to see is the five and a half inch drive.
That's this one this is. Let's see.
This is a 1 TB drive.
1 TB just isn't what it used to be, but it's the same idea.
In this case, I had to physically remove it.
You can see these are screw holes along the side.
There are screw holes on the bottom
exactly how it gets attached to your old computer.
And therefore, exactly the steps you have to take to remove it from an old computer.
They vary dramatically from computer to computer.
But what you'll end up with is usually something about this size about this
thickness, although sometimes they'll be a little bit thicker.
And again, this same interface here this same SATA interface.
And in fact, even though the drives are different sizes, the actual SATA interface
you can see is exactly the same size for both.
So the connection is the same regardless of the drive size.
And again, I keep saying SADA,
that's the important interface to look for for this style of connector,
it's pretty much the only connector you're going to see in any machine or any hard
drive that's going to be of any use these days.
So the thing to look for is, of course, the size of the external enclosure.
Now the external enclosure is going to be either five and a half.
In other words, size big enough for this or three and a half.
Now, as it turns out,
I have with me this external drive, as you'll see in a moment,
it's actually not screwed closed, because this is one that was actually
in use a few minutes ago down in my basement.
But this is an example of what you will end up with an external drive.
It'll have maybe some blinking lights in the front.
It'll have a case of some sort.
And then, of course, interface connections of some sort in the back.
In this case, there's a power switch.
This does have an external power supply
that comes with it that needs to be plugged in.
This is the USB connection that you would be plugging the USB cable into.
And then these two on this drive specifically or FireWire connectors.
Not particularly important these days, I would focus mostly on the USB connection.
And if you're getting a new USB enclosure,
make sure that that's a USB three interface.
But let's look at what's inside.
Once you take the screws out.
There are screws here on this side
and on that side, once you take these screws out,
this comes off and the whole thing slides out of the enclosure.
Since I've got a front plate on it that I
didn't remove, it actually slides out forward.
And you'll see then that what's left is, in fact a five and a half inch hard drive,
very much like the one I was showing you earlier, right?
Same idea, same form factor.
And you can see that the external
enclosure comes with a circuit board that actually provides the interface
that plugs into this SATA connector on the drive.
You can't see it very well here because
it's buried down underneath this wire and this cable.
But that's what's connecting this old internal drive.
This happens to be a one five terabyte drive.
This old internal drive is connected now to this interface.
And all this interface really does is it converts from this set interface
that the drives all use to the USB interface that you care about.
That's really all it is. Now.
I've got this screwed in place,
but it's a fairly simple operation to get it connected and screw it into place
and then close up the case and you'll have what you need in my case.
What I'm going to do here is just go ahead and put it back in the case.
And if I had the screws with me,
I would screw it back together, and that would be it.
I'd have my external drive.
I'd have my one five terabyte USB external
drive here, ready to go, as it turns out, because I leave it in my basement.
I got lazy and I actually leave it this way.
I leave it uncovered, a little bit of cooling.
It's just not that big a deal for me.
I think it might make a little bit less noise in this case.
But again, all I have plugged into it, then are the power that drives the thing
and the USB connection that connect it to the PC that's using it.
And I believe this drive is currently being used as a backup drive.
Now, there's one other form factor
that Unfortunately, I don't have any extras to show you of here.
I'll show you a picture.
This is what's called an M two SSD.
Now, I mentioned SSDs before we'll go back to my drive here.
You'll see, I'm holding the three and a half inch drive.
You will find SSDs quite often larger SSDs in this form factor.
So rather than having the circle or rather than looking like they might contain
spinning magnetic disks, rather, they're just full of circuitry.
They've got the SATA interface so
that they can simply plug and play replace an existing hard drive.
In fact, that's very likely what's happened to this drive.
I probably took it out of a laptop and simply replaced the drive with an SSD
of probably greater capacity and, of course, much greater speed.
The bottom line, though, is that SSD was exactly the same size
and shape and interface as this particular drive.
So you'll find SSDs that look Leo like
this, but more and more you will now also find SSDs that look like this.
The M.2
basically just a circuit board that plugs somewhere into your computer.
There are external cases for these.
You can buy external cases for the M.2.
Honestly, external SSDs aren't really terribly valuable right now.
Your best bet is to keep your SSDs as internal drives, but they are faster.
And if you've got on USB three or better
interface, then they can in fact, make for pretty Nifty external drives as well.
So let's talk a little bit about the data
that you might store on your external drives.
Remember, once you connected to your
system, an external drive looks like just another drive to your operating system.
You can copy all the files you want to you can do a number of things with it that you
can do with any other drive on your system.
There are some important things that you cannot or should not do.
For example, you should not install software on an external drive.
The reason for that is actually fairly simple. Installing software
installs it both to wherever you said to put it right.
Whatever hard drive you said to put it on as well as the Windows Registry.
If while you're using the software for any
reason, the external drive becomes disconnected, it can really ruin your day.
It can really mess up whatever it is you're working on at the time.
A lot of the time, maybe even most of the time,
external drives are going to be slower than your internal drives.
So internal drives really are the right place to install software.
Now, that doesn't mean you can't install the data.
You can't copy your data to external drives.
I've certainly done my share of even video editing on external drives.
As long as I'm using a USB three or better
USB interface, that's fast enough that it actually can work and work.
Well, I've since moved to an internal drive.
That's an SSD, which is faster still,
but the point being that having external data on these external drives,
as long as the interface is fast enough actually works pretty well.
The best thing to do with an external
drive, in my opinion, is to use it for I'll just call it either backing up.
That's a great place for your backup
software to put its image backups archiving.
It's a great place to keep stuff that you
want to keep long term, but you don't necessarily need to access
every day or stuff that you just don't use very often.
So think about exactly what you're going to put on that external drive.
But remember that whatever you put on your external drive, you don't necessarily have
to put on your internal drive with one exception.
And this is one that I think a lot
of people get a little confused about, regardless of where you place your data,
be it on an internal drive or on an external drive if it's only in one place.
In other words, if that data exists in one and only one place, it's not backed up.
Now, if you're using your external drive
as your backup drive as I do, then that is your backup.
You've got the backup of your main system.
For example, I have Macrium Reflect
configured to automatically back up the C drive on this machine.
The machine I'm using right now to an external drive.
Great two copies of everything.
I don't have to do anything more than that.
However, if you're storing data on an external drive and it's the only
place that data exists, you're going to want to back that data up.
Somehow, you're going to want to copy you to another external drive, another system,
copy it to the cloud use a backup program, whatever you want to make sure that your
data is backed up regardless of where it happens to be stored.
I have heard too many stories of people
who have copied data to their backup drive, but in reality,
what they did is they moved the one copy of their data to their backup drive.
And then when that backup drive failed, they lost the data that had been on it.
But it was a backup.
No, it wasn't.
It was the only copy of the data.
And therefore, when that drive failed, it took the data with it.
Anyway. I hope that's helpful.
I hope the little bit of show until worked well for you.
This is a great way.
External drives are a great way to use for what I'll call overflow data things
that you're not using every day, things that you're not using constantly,
but things that you definitely want to keep and have available and accessible.
In my case, as I said,
I very often will take the old hard drives out of old machines,
put them in external enclosures, connect them up to one machine in my basement.
Use them for backing up.
It's great hope that was helpful for updates.
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i'm Leo Notenboom. This is askleo.com