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. For related links for comments
and more visit as askleo.com/4768 i'm Leo Notenboom. This is askleo.com
