Using Old Hard Drives
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Do you have some old hard drives packed away and collecting dust? So did Howard Wolinsky and here is what he did, using Newer Tech’s USB 2.0 Universal Drive Adapter:
“…Dust off the old hard drive and plug in a cable linking it to the USB port in your computer. On larger drives, you’ll need to plug in a cord to power up with household current. Smaller drives don’t need the extra juice; they’re powered by the USB.
The old hard drive, only moments before slumbering, will show up as an external drive on your computer. Drag and drop files at will.”
link: A soft spot for old hard drives?
It seems to work for Mr Wolinsky. If anyone else has used the USB 2.0 Universal Drive Adapter, perhaps he/she can provide some additional feedback. As Mr Wolinsky mentioned, this would be a nice means to backup data. And do backup…
Catherine Forsythe
[tags]hard drives, usb 2.0 universal drive adapter, backup[/tags]
4 Comments
University Update - Linux - Using Old Hard Drives
July 29th, 2007
at 3:59pm
[...] YouTube Contact the Webmaster Link to Article linux Using Old Hard Drives » Posted at DogReader on Sunday, July 29, 2007 [ Author Avatar] Do you have some old hard drives packed away and collecting dust? … Buffalo Boosts External Hard Drive Power Cloning a Linux Hard Drive Seagate envisions 2.5 TB desktop View Original Article » [...]
lumpy
July 29th, 2007
at 4:37pm
Strange you should mention this. I have three old 4 gig hard drives that I have been using for year. I have a hot swap in my machine and once a week I use to to “drag and Drop” the “My Documents” folder to. This gives me at least three weeks of redundant back up of my more frequently used and modified files.
I also have an external USB adapter with an 8 GIG I use to redundantly store all my photos and other data I cherish. A friend of mine does the same. Now here is the important part of the trick. Every Month or so we get together and swap the external drives. I hold his data and visa versa. For real security of data, you need your back up in a different location than you computer.
Daniel Klíma
July 30th, 2007
at 2:42pm
I do not have old HDDs so long as commenter before me,but it works even for early 90’s HDD.The smallest one is 42MB…
BTW within 5 years I am going to purchase old computer parts,so do not throw out them,the Computer Museum is coming…
David
July 30th, 2007
at 3:24pm
I`ve been using a cheap adaptor for ages. Very simple, budget solution. It just consists of a mains power supply with appropriate power plug for the drive and a USB lead with the IDE connector. A bit short, but I`ve used a cheap USB extension lead. See http://tinyurl.com/yrr32a for the item in a UK components supplier catalogue. No drivers needed with XP and it just shows up as another drive. Works well, if you don`t mind the drive being completely out in the open, with no caddy or enclosure, etc. One suggestion I saw somewhere was to use an old, small drive (2Gb, or thereabouts) exclusively for the paging file. This seems a bit OTT to me and I`m not sure whether reliability would be a factor here, as a small drive is almost certainly bound to be pretty ancient. My own paging file is on my second internal hard drive, so I don`t know about the efficacy of this arrangement!