![\"The](\"http:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2008\/07\/boneyard.png\" "\\"boneyard\\"")
<\/p>\nBefore 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.
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\nThere is a two stage process I go through when I toss out an old computer.<\/p>\n
First, I don’t toss the computer out. I put it out in the boneyard.<\/p>\n
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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.)<\/p>\n
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<\/em> book. (It was cheaper to buy those old computers on eBay and take pictures of them myself than to license pictures from other sources.)<\/p>\n 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:<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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<\/em>. 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.<\/p>\n For example, consider the iMicro IM25COM-SI 2.5 inch USB2.0-SATA&IDE External Drive Enclosure<\/a>. It’s a silver box you can stick an old IDE or SATA hard drive into and, wham<\/em>!, instant external USB storage for your PC. The cost? Only $14.86.<\/p>\n Here are some other gizmos to consider to rescue those old hard drives:<\/p>\n ATA\/ATAPI\/IDE\/SATA to USB 2.0 Universal Adapter.<\/a><\/p>\n![\"Hard](\"http:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2008\/07\/harddrives.png\" "\\"harddrives\\"")
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