With the advent and widespread use of SSD storage technology, traditional hard drives, including the 2.5-inch drives used in laptops, are no longer the first choice for fixed storage in computers manufactured today.
And it is that solid state drives provide a series of benefits compared to traditional hard drives made up of electronic and mechanical components. Its information storage system is based exclusively on electronic components represented by interconnected Flash memory chips.
This helps to considerably reduce the processing time of the information by the processor and therefore a better performance of the system in general. The fact of dispensing with mechanical parts also means less energy consumption, which translates into a longer battery life, in the case of a laptop.
For this same reason, in older laptops, an HDD is also not the first choice for a hardware upgrade, as the ever-lower cost of an SSD and ever-increasing capacity has made users decide on this class of devices.
But what to do with an old laptop hard drive that still does its job?
The only real possibility (besides leaving it abandoned on some shelf) is to recycle it to store data. But given that it is very complicated to use it as a secondary disk of the same laptop (due to the space limitations of its casing) and it is unfeasible to put it as a slave disk of a desktop computer due to its incompatibility with the internal connections, it only remains to adapt it for its operation as an external USB drive.
The necessary hardware
For this purpose, there are adapter cabinets which are very easy to get at computer product stores or online stores such as Facebook Marketplace and Mercadolibre. You just need to be sure that the connection you use is the right one for the type of hard drive to be recycled (usually the SATA connection, although it is also possible that the hard drive to be recycled is a disk with an IDE interface, before SATA). Another detail to take into account is that it is compatible with the USB inputs that exist on any computer, television or streaming player.
Assembly
For its assembly, it is only a matter of having a little common sense, since there is usually a single connection mode between the HDD and the adapter case cover. It is usually enough to put a little pressure between both connections and then secure the cabinet with its small security screws. In addition, it is very likely that these cabinets or metal casings have a user manual that facilitates the process.
Configuration
Also, the recognition of the new external hard drive by the computer is immediate. Once done, it can be formatted according to the file system of the device in which it is going to be used and partitioned at the user’s choice.
Its behavior will be the same as any USB flash drive or memory card. In other words, it can be used as a portable storage medium or to carry operating systems capable of booting from USB drives. For example, Linux, Chrome OS, Raspbian, among many others.
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