Well worth $20
Mar. 22nd, 2018 02:21 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
tephraI have been pulling the hard drives out of dead PCS, ones that I could not boot and do a full reformat and install on, and then recycling the rest. As a result I had a stack of hard drives that I didn't know what to do with. I couldn't just throw them out or recycle them intact, there might be information I didn't want someone to be able to retrieve on them. So after some thought, I went looking to see what could be used that cost less than a "convert an internal hard drive to external" kit. This is what I found, and it works great.
It's not pretty, there's a wall-wart power supply that you hook to your drive, and a dongle that attaches to the ribbon cable connection of the drive that plugs into a USB 3.0 port on your PC. Set the jumper on your hard drive to master or single, attach the power, turn it on, wait for about twenty seconds and then plug in the USB. Wait for windows to find the drive and spin it up (this is not instant, it takes a bit) and then use file explorer to do what needs to be done. The drive just hangs out there naked and on life support while you rip out what you need, but it does the job.
It's a bit of a trip looking at the contents of these old drives, not just for what is on them but also for how tiny they are. I have 64GB USB drives because they are cheap these days and I could fit the contents of all but one of my stack of old hard drives onto one of them, and the last drive on another with four gigs to spare.
It's not pretty, there's a wall-wart power supply that you hook to your drive, and a dongle that attaches to the ribbon cable connection of the drive that plugs into a USB 3.0 port on your PC. Set the jumper on your hard drive to master or single, attach the power, turn it on, wait for about twenty seconds and then plug in the USB. Wait for windows to find the drive and spin it up (this is not instant, it takes a bit) and then use file explorer to do what needs to be done. The drive just hangs out there naked and on life support while you rip out what you need, but it does the job.
It's a bit of a trip looking at the contents of these old drives, not just for what is on them but also for how tiny they are. I have 64GB USB drives because they are cheap these days and I could fit the contents of all but one of my stack of old hard drives onto one of them, and the last drive on another with four gigs to spare.
