Give a New Life to Your Old Hard Drive

Nowadays the demands of users to store digital data are continuously increasing and the ways of storage are also changed. It seems that free cloud storage and streaming services are going to take a new revolution in the digital storage world. Whenever an old computer dies or upgraded into a new highly configured system, some of its parts become useless and the hard drive is one of those old parts. If you have been a regular user of the computer for past decades, you must have a couple of old hard drives. You must be thinking sometimes that what you should do with these storage devices, which are still working.

Note: The hard drive could be a SATA or IDE; it may be a 3.5″ drive from a desktop PC or an older 2.5″ laptop HDD. It could also be an external hard drive that never used in any system. Every type of hard drive needs a different way of connection so it is completely dependent upon its type. You can use your hard drive according to its connecting demands, which could be an adapter or anything else.

Let us Discuss Some Ideas That May Work for You to Reuse Old Hard Drives:

Install a RAID System

If you are a desktop user, you can consider a RAID (Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks) installation option in your system. You can use a spare hard drive (create RAID or RAID 1) and mirror your data from another drive. The only thing you remember is that the hard drive must be of equal size to the system drive or the data stored in it, you want to mirror.<

Run a New Operating System

You can set up a dual boot on your system. It could be complicated if you use it in a single hard drive by partitions but with a spare hard drive, you can easily install a new OS without any fear and play with it as you want. If you have a free slot on your PC, you can simply attach your spare hard drive with a new OS or can unplug the old hard drive from your current system and attach the spare drive and use the new Operating system.

Increase the Space of Your Current System

You can simply connect your spare hard drive if your computer has an extra drive bay. You can increase the storage capacity of your system and enjoy the system space for storing your specified data.

Use as an External Hard Drive with Benefits

You can turn your internal drive into an external hard drive by just connecting it with a USB enclosure. You can buy USB enclosures from anywhere and use them as an external hard drive.

Some of the Common Usage of External Hard Drives Are:

Store Backups

To decrease the risk of losing data you can store a company of your important data in it other than backup. Always remember that spare drives are old hard drives so it is quite risky to store the direct backup files in them.

Create a System Image

You can also use the spare hard drive to store the clone of your original hard drive. In case anything happens to the system, you can restore it from the spare hard drive and continue your work without any break.

Turn It Into a Media Center

You can make your spare hard drive media storage center where you can store your all photos, audio, videos, movies, and many more things according to your choice like a flash drive.

Earn Some Money

Lastly, you can donate your spare hard drive to a friend or sell it to any needy one. However, before that, you have to make sure that you wipe out your hard drive data, as it could be risky for you that your valuable data is in the wrong place. There is certified hard drive data eraser software by which you can wipe out all the data and make it non-recoverable. A spare unused hard drive can be used in many cool ways, it depends upon you that what you ‘choose for you. You can learn many things from it or can help someone needy.