July 25, 2008

Save Your Old, Crappy Hard Drives!

Filed under: Main — Tags: , — admin @ 12:01 am

Before I shoot all my old hard drives, I should seriously look into the opportunity to resurrect them as external USB drives. I can do that for about $14 a pop.

There is a two stage process I go through when I toss out an old computer.

First, I don’t toss the computer out. I put it out in the boneyard.

The Wambooli Boneyard

Any computer I used for the past several years goes out there. That way, should I need to test something, I can haul out an older computer and do those tests. In fact, you’ll see a few of those old computers in upcoming videos that I’m doing for my latest book. (More on that when it gets closer to publication.)

The boneyard also contains a collection older computers I keep for archival purposes, such as the portable models you’ll see in my Laptops For Dummies book. (It was cheaper to buy those old computers on eBay and take pictures of them myself than to license pictures from other sources.)

The second step I go through when tossing out a computer is to yank its hard drive. So the hard drive remains, but the computer’s useless hulk is properly disposed of. Here’s my current stack o’ storage:

Hard Drives Waiting

I’ll either take those hard drives out to the range and put a bullet in ’em, or I could, for a very low price, re-use the hard drives as external storage for my current line-up of PCs.

Some of the hard drives are just too old to be useful. For example, the fat one in the upper left of the photo (above), is a 230MB hard drive. Yes, megabytes. Other hard drives also sport less-than-adequate storage: a 1GB or 2GB hard drive was really something in its day, but is a joke presently. But if you have an old hard drive with ample storage, you can put it back to use with a cheap adapter.

For example, consider the iMicro IM25COM-SI 2.5 inch USB2.0-SATA&IDE External Drive Enclosure. It’s a silver box you can stick an old IDE or SATA hard drive into and, wham!, instant external USB storage for your PC. The cost? Only $14.86.

Here are some other gizmos to consider to rescue those old hard drives:

ATA/ATAPI/IDE/SATA to USB 2.0 Universal Adapter.

Addonics IDE – USB 2.0 Converter.

Now I haven’t tried any of these gizmos yet. But at the price, what is there for you to lose? You take an old hard drive that you would have thrown out anyway, and you revive it for use on your current PC? Sounds like a good deal to me!

4 Comments

  1. The other thing these are great for is pulling data off of hard drives where the motherboard has died or something.

    I just bought one. I have been meaning to have one on hand for years. Looks like they’ve really come down in price! Thanks for the heads-up.

    Comment by jamh51 — July 25, 2008 @ 12:32 pm

  2. Good idea. I’m kind of curious to see what’s on those old drives myself, especially some old laptop hard drives. Sometimes I back things up to the laptop before I leave — email and work files. That might help me reconstruct some long-gone data. Thanks!

    Comment by admin — July 25, 2008 @ 8:34 pm

  3. Really: Keep those old luggables and OLD hard drives. Someone may want them.

    Comment by linuxlove — July 27, 2008 @ 12:52 pm

  4. Yep! I have some old memory as well. OLD memory. I figure someone might want that memory dearly. What the heck. I’m a capitalist! 🙂

    Comment by admin — July 27, 2008 @ 1:21 pm

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