How to Recover Data from an Old 3.5" Desktop Hard Drive

hello everyone and welcome back to another episode of Gizmo Joe today we have a 3.5 inch mechanical hard drive uh basically the story behind this guy is that I had an old desktop computer laying around and um I wanted to get rid of it it was taking up a space in my house and I was like wait a minute there's a hard drive in there and I'm sure it's got tons of good stuff on there and sure enough it does it's got uh photos and music and all that sort of stuff so um you know the drive works but uh you know I've kind of shifted away from desktop computers um I only have laptops in the house um and I said to myself how the heck am I going to get all this data off of here I didn't want to Chuck it out with all my data on there as well so like you know that could be questionable and obviously I don't want to contribute to e-waste so we need to figure out a way to connect this guy to a modern laptop now thankfully this is not a super old hard drive I mean it's pretty old I'm not sure what the manufacturer date on here is I think it says 2007 uh so it's pretty old but it's still SATA so it's not IDE so it's not super ancient and that makes things a lot easier because we can find adapters uh that will essentially allow us to hook this up to our laptop now the problem is is that these big 3.5 inch mechanical hard drives need an external power source they cannot be powered via USB so we've got a couple Solutions and I've got one today that I'm going to show you okay folks so what I have in front of me is basically a USB to SATA adapter this one's made by DigiTech computer I got this one used for pretty cheap I found it on eBay here in Australia for like a couple bucks and I said what the heck uh you know the seller said that it was working okay and I said you know give it a shot it was only like five or six bucks and I think a little bit of postage or whatever but basically what this does is allows you to connect pretty much any uh SATA hard drive and then plug the USB into your computer and you should be able to read it so now what's cool about this particular type is that you can use this on 2.5 inch so laptop hard drives as well you can just stick that in there plug it into your computer and your computer will recognize it however for the big 3.5 inch mechanical drives like this guy here like I said before it needs external power so this actually came with this plug here so what you can see is I'm not sure if this is the original plug that came with this uh the seller didn't specify but you can see it's a little power supply here and uh basically you know it's it's 12 volt by 1.5 amps uh the guy said you know it should work I'm not an electrician so I don't know if that's what that means uh but basically the what how this works is you've got your Barrel plug here and if you look at the adapter itself it has a spot for the barrel plug so I just connect this like so and I've got sort of a mess of cables here but again if you're just doing some data transfer or whatever it's not that big of a deal and I'm going to take this guy plug them into the wall the little uh Power red indicator thing here should come on and then basically what I'm going to do is I'm going to essentially find the SATA connector on my hard drive and just basically plug it into the adapter now excuse use me if this seems a bit strange because I'm trying to do this through a camera lens but all said and done it's going to look like that so what I'm going to do right now is I'm going to grab my laptop and we're going to actually test this guy out we're going to plug this guy into the wall and then we're going to take the USB and we're going to plug it into my laptop and we're going to see if this drive pops up on my laptop all right so stick around okay so as you can see in front of me I've got my laptop I've got my old 500 gig 3.5 inch mechanical hard drive it's already connected to our SATA to USB adapter like I said we've got the power plug just here what we're going to do is we're going to plug this into an extension cord that I've got just over here on the top the left hand corner if you guys can see that I'm just going to plug them in foreign indicator light is on I don't know if you can hear it but the hard drive is definitely spinning um and don't hear any clicking or anything like that so that's a good sign anyway so uh we've got that now we need to plug this guy into our laptop so I'm just going to take this and this is uh USB 3 by the way obviously your performance is going to depend on the speed of your drive I'm not expecting amazing performance from a drive from 2007 but my computer obviously just recognized that something was plugged in and made the little chime and I'm going to see if I can try to get all this in the same shot I apologize um you guys have been watching me for a while know that my setup isn't exactly super professional um so I apologize for that now uh let's see I'm gonna bring up a file explorer window here to see if this guy's been recognized yet oh and I'm getting a little notification and it just says storage uh they've labeled it the e Drive has been connected and yep sure enough uh we are a go I'm gonna tilt this camera up a little bit and um I know it's hard for you guys to see uh but basically the e Drive here which again is this external storage drive connected via that Saturday USB adapter uh is showing all of my files here so I've got documents I've got pictures I've got music uh let's just take a look at the music folder and there's heaps of stuff in here and that's great because it means I can uh you know grab all this stuff I haven't lost this data just looking in the pictures folder right now it's saying working on it so you know let's see fingers crossed hopefully I haven't lost any precious memories that I haven't looked at in years but anyway um what what you get here is basically um you know a really inexpensive way to access these bigger 3.5 inch hard drives so you know instead of contributing to E-Waste um or you know um you know potentially uh sensitive information being on these hard drives um I mean I've got a documents folder in here I mean I've got you know I mean there's tax stuff in here all sorts of stuff uh which you know obviously I don't want in the hands of anyone that's not me and so um you know they're it's it's a good cheap easy way to access all this stuff to recover all this information um and you know that you're not just chucking it out so I'm really pleased with this purchase now um like I said this particular brand of SATA connector I'm not sure if they sell it anymore I'll try to have a look online and if I do find it I'll leave a link in the description however you can get these a bunch of Manufacturers make them and they're in a bunch of different styles anyway um just stick with me I'm just going to put my computer away for a second yeah so like I was saying this is a cheap inexpensive way to do some data recovery and to potentially even put these old hard drives to use um you know I mean there's nothing that says I uh can't use that for storage um this maybe isn't the most elegant way to do it uh this is a good inexpensive way to do some data recovery and like I said you can take this uh you know power plug out and just use this with standard 2.5 laptop drives or ssds so that's handy as well but you know there are other options on the market you can get ones that um you know are complete 3.5 inch enclosures so if you do want to you know sit this on your desk and use it as external storage uh you definitely could there's also some others that are like kind of almost like a toaster design where you kind of plug the drive in from the top and the top bit kind of hangs out of it or whatever um but you know all in all whether you are just using it for data recovery or or do you want to put this hard drive back to use these little SATA to USB adapters are great for these old 3.5 inch discs you just got to make sure that it has an external power supply because like I said before your laptop your computer will not supply enough power through that USB in order to get this big guy to work it will be fine with laptop drives which are much smaller but these big desktop drives you need to have external power so if you're in the market for one just make sure that it's got that external power but anyway hopefully this is useful to someone I'm sure a lot of you out there already know about these devices but if you didn't hopefully um you know you've found a solution to put this hard drive back to you sir to get some uh you know files back or whatever anyway thanks so much for watching uh this is gizmojo signing off

Channel: GizmoJoe

Views: 45,913

Keywords: hard drive, hdd, sata, USB, laptop, desktop, PC, data, recovery, easy, simple, inexpensive, cheap

Id: LyuZ_qYi1mc

Length: 9min 11sec (551 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 16 2022