External Hdd

Recently I had the pleasure of discussing external hard drives with a local customer who had been saving up for one. He was looking for one to transfer his music collection that was filling his dads laptop at the time. He was hesitant to blow £70 on an external drive and asked for some advise. I suggested he take his old hard-drive from his PC that was due for the scrap heap and install it in an external enclose I had in stock for just over £6.

External hard drives are a big market but in many situations they are redundant; most users will have purchased more than one computer and chances are that when it has come to the end of its useful life it would be considered close to worthless. Most charity shops won't even take old machines anymore as health and safety regulations mean it's often impossible to sell them on without the appropriate paperwork. Although it is possible to thoroughly and securely wipe the data off an old hard drive, the number of horror stories that you hear means that such a large number of drives reach the end of their life by having a 10mm drill bit put through them.

Instead of simply destroying your old hard drive, why not try putting it to use by popping it in to an external enclosure instead? This way you have both given yourself a new external hard drive (normally for less than £10) and retained all your old files which can be sorted and kept if needed. If not needed simply wipe the hard drive and start again using the drive as auxiliary storage (especially useful in the case of a laptop computer), a data transfer device or even a backup drive.

There are a few points that you need to consider when purchasing an enclosure:

Size - Old laptop hard drives tend to measure 2.5" whereas their desktop equivalents tend to be 3.5" in size and it is of course important that you get the correct enclosure for your particular drive. Not only will you not physically fit a 3.5" drive in a 2.5" enclosure, but a 3.5" drive requires a separate power supply whereas the smaller 2.5" models can usually draw sufficient power from the USB port.

Hard Drive Interface - Your hard drive would have previously connected to the computer via an IDE or a SATA interface - this is primarily determined by the age of the device. Newer drives tend to be of a SATA design but if you are recuing a drive from an older machine it is more likely to have an IDE connection. The two are quite distinctly different and as such identification shouldn't be a problem; IDE connectors are fairly long with 39 pins (one pin in the middle of the connector is absent to ensure the cable is connected correctly) whereas SATA connections constitute a small 7 pin port with a right angle at one end.

Interface with the Computer - Most enclosures tend to utilise a USB 2.0 interface and in the majority of circumstances this would be the most appropriate method of connecting it to your PC. Try to avoid older USB 1.1 devices which look identical but will perform significantly slower. Also, check to see if your computer supports either Firewire or eSATA as, if appropriate, these may offer faster data transfer speeds between your machine and external drive.