Old Laptop HDD's for backup / archive

[jimbo45]

Hi there.

If you are upgrading a Laptop to an SSD or higher capacity drive or even replacing a laptop DON'T throw away the internal HDD's -- even if they are only 160 GB.

These make absolutely EXCELLENT backup / Archive storage areas or even Music / movie libraries.

Use a USB2==>SATA connector to connect to machine (even a tablet) - the low power of these devices make them great for this purpose as you don't need any extra power supply or even have to use enclosures.

I "rescued" 20 of these from a store that was just chucking out stuff -- re-format, HDD test and they are all good. Provided you haven't got too many users concurrently they go well in a NAS server too. Even though these disks aren't the fastest they are more than fast enough for streaming purposes (the limit is probably your Wi-Fi connection rather than the HDD's).

Here's the pic of a USB==>sata connector -- costs around 2 USD.

BTW opening up a laptop to get at the HDD is no problem -- even if you have a very old laptop the HDD can be "rescued".



Cheers
jimbo

 

[Lady Fitzgerald]

Excellent advice, jimbo. I've rescued every drive from previous machines except the 60GB IDE Maxtor that was in my seven year old Gateway I retired around six years ago. I even still have three 3.5" dead drives I use for dummies in a new case for making up PSU cables, etc.

Instead of a cable like what you show, I have both a 2.5" and a 3.5" dock built into my desktop computer. I use a couple of USB 3.0 enclosures for backing up my current notebook (I'm using a couple of 500GB 2.5" WD blacks I had purchased specifically for backups in them, however). Before the enclosures, I used a cute little StarTech 2.5" docks. I use the rescued 2.5" HDDs for tests, experiments, and transferring data from one machine to another when I have more than what my USB sticks can handle. Otherwise, they are mostly too small and/or too slow for anything else.