Converting Hard Drive To External Storage

You can put it back to work as external storage.

Converting hard drive to external storage.

Don t throw it away. Here are a couple of things to consider should you decide to convert your old internal hard drive into an external usb hard drive. It takes surprisingly little effort to turn an old or new hard drive into an external drive perfect for stashing your extra files on. But the easiest way to upgrade is to use hard drive cloning software or hardware that lets you duplicate your original hard drive on a much bigger blank hard drive.

Be careful not to damage or break the casing. Amazon s choice for convert internal hard drive to external hard drive sabrent 2 5 inch sata to usb 3 0 tool free clear external hard drive enclosure optimized for ssd supports uasp sata iii ec ocub. This method is completely tool less and requires no exper. Let s look at how you can blow the dust off those old drives and save money in the process.

As you can imagine by looking at the internal hard drive its lacks connections and protection for use in the big bad world. Every external hard drive is structured differently but the general steps to take when dismantling one are as follows. The sata or ide connections it comes with are only really useful if it. 1 if your computer doesn t have usb 3 0 or usb 3 1 ports you can probably add some for about the cost of a good pizza.

Plug the external drive into your computer. 32gb sandisk cruzer blade usb flash drive offer valid only for the qualifying products above bought online through the western digital store and will be applied automatically at checkout when cart total equals 100 or more after any discounts and before any applicable shipping or taxes. So you ve upgraded the hard drive in your computer and you re left with this old seemingly useless bare hard drive. If you have ever upgraded your computer or simply have old hard drives laying round it s possible to convert the unit into an external hard drive.

Take a thin blade to the external hard drive s side or wherever you notice a partition and try to separate the cover into two pieces. Here s a simple method to convert any internal hard disk or ssd into a portable external hard disk. To use the external drive simply plug it into the appropriately labeled sized port on the computer. Depending on the size of the hard drive you may have dual cables one to connect to the computer and another to connect to a power supply.