How to connect a SSD or HDD externally via a USB adapter to your PC, clone old drive or backup files

hi guys daniel here and welcome back to another my tech how-to videos uh about four years ago i made a video on how to transfer data between your pc and an external hard drive uh this is a sort of an updated one it was a while ago things have moved on a bit this is a 2.5 inch ssd it will work with a normal 2.5 inch hard drive um what we're going to be using what we're going to be using to do this is the sabrin usb 3.0 adapter you know it's usb 3.0 because it has the blue um color on it there we go that's high speed and this adapter also provides power we'll check that out in a minute um you can use this adapter with an ssd or a mechanical hard drive as i know 2.5 inch this size not the real big one if you did have a big hard drive a 3.5 inch you'll need a sort of a docking station which is powered and they typically just slot in like that but it will need to be powered these smaller 2.5 inch drives don't require as much power otherwise you'll run into issues but when trying to plug it into windows now why would you want to do this well chances are if you come on this video you probably want to try transfer data from an old hard drive to an ssd or you just want to plug it into computer and and back things up this is what i want to use it for so hopefully this guide is helpful to you so we'll crack on so as i say you will need a usb adapter something like this would work this is about eight pounds it's good to have this kind of thing because if in the future you ever need to transfer data or change your drive this is the kind of thing you'd want to make your life easier um you might not have lots of free slots sata ports on the pc so this just makes it easier i'm using a 240 gig kingston drive basically um so on these drives you've got you've got your data and your power and same there they're keyed which means they have a horizontal part and a vertical bit just like a key and they do go in a certain way so it's it's hard to mess it up just take your time so we need to basically plug this in nice and easy plugs in there like that i'll try and get this in one hand whilst filming so as you can see so push that in there like that you're not just want a tight fit basically so that is plugged in there you can see i'll push that down a bit more there we go and the next part all we need to do is find a usb usb free port ideally you want to be using the usb 3 ports on the pc that have the uh blue on them because that's the highest speed these ones on the front don't but that's no big deal they are plugged into a usb 3 on the motherboard header on the motherboard so that's plugged in okay this particular adapter's quite a nice one it's got a blue light telling you that it's powered up so we went into windows we're running windows now we've got my standard nvme drive ssd which is already in the system this one isn't showing up so what we need to do is we need to initialize the disk because it's an ssd so what i'll do is type disk management i'm saying disk disk management on the here or you can just right click the start menu if icon if you're running windows 11. and go to disk management now this will take a couple of seconds to load and pick up basically it's loading all your drives up it's told me i've got to initialize something this is the drive here it is 240 gig but it's showing up as two two three it never is never as 100 let's right click this let's click this here go initialize disk okay so that will take a few seconds to do that so basically if you plug your ssd into your computer and you've not used it before you it doesn't appear on the this pc or the file explorer with the rest of your drive this is what you need to do okay so it's been initialized and that says it's unallocated so we right click this go new simple volume this is just a very simple way of doing it i literally want to use this for backups so no big deal we signed a drive letter e um we can call it something as well so i'll just call it ssd perform quick format next and that's just going to do things for a few seconds shouldn't take too long and it's it's doing something because it's flashing that's quite a nice feature so that also acts as the power to it so it's the powers on the usb and it's also doing stuff so apparently that is now done and it's now ready and here we have our ssd and create a folder in it and i can unplug it and it'll go plug it back in and there it is so that is how you connect a ssd to your pc this will work with mac as well this is the easiest option of doing it and as i said earlier the reason why you'd want to do this is to use it for backups i'd say i want to just use it for backups or if you want to if you've got a drive in your computer that's failing or you've got a hard drive in your laptop you can buy this this this whole thing here with the usb cable and the drive you can use something like acronis true image to clone it on the front actually i've used that in the past it says it here it says it's including acronis true image cloning software so what that would do is you would run it it would clone everything from one drive to the next but when you are doing that make sure you just double check what drive you're selecting once the cloning process is finished you can unplug the old hard drive or say the old ssd from your computer pop this one in and you're done thanks for watching guys if you've got any questions write them in the comments thanks very much

Channel: Daniel&John

Views: 51,480

Keywords: hard drive, usb, external, externally, sata, ide, pc, windows, usb cable, how to, connect, windows 10, windows 7, migrate, ssd, transfer, samsung, wd, western digital, maxtor, seagate, hard drivers, data loss, backup, restore, usb 1, usb 2, usb 3, fast, data transfer, sabrent, windows 11

Id: XzG6K-JCwZg

Length: 6min 40sec (400 seconds)

Published: Thu Jan 27 2022