Don’t rush to throw away hard drives left over after upgrading your computer or hard drives that have failed - you can always find a new use for them. For example, make a mirror, a clock, a safe for storing cash, a network drive and other useful things.
The purposes for which old hard drives can be used depend on whether they are in working order or not. It is curious that a functioning hard drive has many fewer uses than a non-functioning one.
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Do-it-yourself external storage. USB drive from laptop hard drive.
Sometimes we have a hard drive that we simply have nowhere to use.
It's an unnecessary gadget and you don't know where to use it. Okay, let's adapt it to an external drive and store our data on it. This is exactly what we will discuss in our article today; you will learn how to make an external drive from a hard drive. Well, without delay, let's get started. We also recommend watching a training video in which the author shows in detail how to turn an unnecessary hard drive into your external drive. Who knows, maybe after watching the video you won’t have to read the article.
Mirror
Magnetic disks located in the hard drive can serve as an excellent mirror. The discs must be removed very carefully to avoid chips and scratches. They can then be placed in the office, used as a signal or pocket mirror.
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What do we need
First of all, of course, we need the hard drive itself. Moreover, its form factor does not matter; it can be a 2.5 or 3.5 inch model. You will also have to prepare the case, because the HDD is not protected in any way and cannot be used in this form. Naturally, you will also need tools in the form of a suitable type of screwdriver. SATA-USB adapter, we will talk about it below.
Attention: on some laptops, a large 3.5 hard drive may not start due to insufficient power. If this is noticed, you must definitely use external voltage, but this is practically impossible and it is better not to use such a hard drive.
Magnetic knife bar
Hard disks contain large neodymium magnets that can be used to create a magnetic knife holder. All you need is a strip, magnets, glue and a set of common tools.
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Assembling the device
So, let's start assembling our device. To do this, carefully prepare your work area, remove all extraneous things and place in front of you all the parts needed for assembly. After this, carefully follow each step of our instructions and do the same:
- In order to put the disk in its box, you first need to unscrew 4 bolts, as this is shown in the picture below. Be careful, the delicate printed plates of the drive are very easy to damage, it is better not to touch them at all.
Why is an additional hard drive required?
The problem of low hard disk space can be solved in two ways:
- clearing space on an existing disk
- creating an additional disk
Solving the problem using the first method is always limited by the size of the available hard drive, and modern technologies require more and more space on work gadgets.
Therefore, a reasonable question arises: is it possible to make a hard drive yourself without resorting to the services of specialists, since more free space is constantly needed to store photos, videos and music.
Connecting an external HDD
If your hard drive has been used before and some data has been written to it, there should be no problems. The system recognizes it immediately. But sometimes the HDD does not want to be read and then you need to do the following:
- Using Windows search, launch the Administrative Tools tool, select Computer Management and then Disk Management. You can also use the diskmgmt.msc command entered into the Run utility (Win+R).
- We find our disk, guided by its size, and delete the volume using the context menu.
Expert opinion
Daria Stupnikova
WEB programming and computer systems specialist. Editor of PHP/HTML/CSS site os-helper.ru.
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Attention: Do not mistakenly delete an important partition where your data is stored. It will be almost impossible to restore them!
- We launch the context menu again by right-clicking the mouse and create a simple volume.
- As a result, a step-by-step wizard will launch, in which at the first stage you just need to click “Next”. Then we leave the volume size unchanged, since we will use it completely.
- Specify the drive letter (it’s better to leave it as default) and click “Next” again.
- In the new window, check the disk formatting box, select the file system, write a volume label if necessary, and check the quick format box.
- At the last stage, click “Finish”.
The essence of the problem
The main advantage of computers is their high data processing speed, improved performance compared to other devices, as well as the ability to store and instantly process a huge amount of data. Not the least role in achieving the peak of popularity of personal computers is played by internal devices for storing user information - hard drives "HDD"
.
The use of modern materials and technologies makes it possible to create high-capacity hard drives at a fairly low final cost. You won’t surprise anyone anymore with a hard drive with a capacity of “10 TB”
,
“12 TB”
and even
“16 TB”
.
(SSDs) have become widely used.
.
Made using chip-based technology, SSD
use flash memory to store information. Thanks to this approach, solid-state drives are smaller, lighter, and have significantly higher loading and processing speeds than standard hard drives. However, they are inferior to the latter due to several times higher prices and much lower wear resistance.
It is not surprising that users decide to replace outdated versions of hard drives with new data storage devices, more modern and faster.
However, no matter how attractive the option of using a hard drive to store basic user data may be, there are objective reasons to use other information storage facilities. Today there are a large number of external drives and USB
flash drives. Additionally, due to the ability to access from anywhere, various cloud data storage facilities on the Internet are becoming widely popular.
One of the important reasons for replacing an old hard drive with a new one is the high probability of the latter failing. Very often, the average duration of uninterrupted operation of a HDD
is five to six years.
And when the disk's service life is coming to an end, a number of signs appear signaling this. We described in more detail about the possible signs of failure of your hard drive in our earlier article: “Five signs that your hard drive is reaching the end of its life, and what to do about it now?”
.
Or your hard drive has already become unusable, and you are determined to throw it away as unnecessary. But don't rush to make hasty decisions. And in this case, your disk still has some value, even if you have checked it and it is not possible to recover information from it. Read our article about the possible use of old disks in any condition.
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