Hard drives and SSDs have a finite life and, therefore, from time to time we have to change them and make sure we pass the information from one unit to another. However, many times we make the change before the end of its useful life occurs. If you have found a storage unit lying around the room and want to extract data by connecting the hard drive to the PC, we will tell you how to do it.
Many times, when we replace a hard drive with a more modern one, it is possible that we do not copy all the information from the old drive to the new one, thinking that certain data will no longer be of any use to us. But over time it can happen that, in reality, those data that remained on the old hard drive, now we do need them.
Ways to connect an old hard drive to our PC
One of the biggest challenges when connecting an older storage drive to extract your data is its communication interface. As time has gone by, much faster ways of communicating peripherals have appeared than before and in many cases new standards that mean new types of connectors.
For example, we no longer see acronyms like SCSI and IDE in the specifications of new hard drives, which were replaced by SATA interfaces in computers. The result? A lot of veteran hard drives have become veritable paperweights, even when they work flawlessly and flawlessly. Obviously, due to their slowness and lack of space, we do not recommend using them on your newer PC, so we are going to focus on the task of connecting an old hard drive to your computer, in order to extract the data.
Reinstall the hard drive in our computer
This is the most logical of all and the one you should do if you have a tower with enough space to add the old unit. Today’s motherboards have enough SATA connectors to hold four or more hard drives inside, and the same can be said for power supplies. Therefore, the latter must have a free power connector for peripherals (either Molex or SATA, depending on the standard used by our unit), we will need a data cable (IDE or SATA), a free data connector in our motherboard and, of course, open the computer to be able to do all this.
So if you have an internal hard drive with a SATA connection from your latest PC and you think you could use it, then don’t throw it away or leave it in a stored drawer. That additional storage can go very well and since you will have amortized it with the use in your previous computer, then those extra gigabytes will cost you nothing and less. Of course, make sure it is in perfect condition.
And what if my hard drive is old?
In the event that our hard drive is old, then we will need an adapter interface, which takes the data from the drive of ancient times and connects it to a modern drive. These adapters don’t have much of a secret and can be used to retrieve information from a hard drive old enough to come of age if it were a human being.
Our advice is that once you have done the process of connecting the veteran hard drive, then do the process of rescuing your information to another drive. Either to a partition of an internal or external drive. More than anything due to the fact that it is the one that is most likely to fail and what interests us is to extract the data from the storage unit that we have connected.
The problem is that the options to connect a hard drive internally require much more skill than doing it externally through an adapter and do not improve performance, which is why for us it is much better to opt for other options if your HDD uses an old interface such as IDE or SCSI
Connect the drive using a USB adapter
Another way to connect the unit to our computer, much easier than reinstalling it, is to use an external USB adapter that has support for the IDE and/or SATA hard drive standards. Of course, it is important that the adapter has an auxiliary power port because, while 2.5-inch hard drives and SSDs can be powered entirely from a USB port, 3.5-inch drives need more power to be able to function.
Use a docking station
A somewhat safer way to connect our old hard drive to our PC is by using a docking station . This type of unit allows the connection of two 2.5 and/or 3.5-inch hard drives to a base that then communicates directly with our PC through a USB cable. However, something you should make sure of before making your purchase is that the docking station supports the IDE and/or SATA standard, depending on the type of hard drive you want to connect to it.
Use an external hard drive enclosure
Another option that is also very valid is to use an external enclosure for hard drives . In this type of box we can install our unit, so that it is somewhat better protected against possible blows that we could give it due to inattention when handling it. The luck is that there are external enclosures that combine the IDE and SATA standards in the same (years ago there were no such models and it was time to buy one of each).
Take an external hard drive out of its box and reuse it with our old hard drive
This last option is already a bit desperate, and implies, if you carry it out, losing the guarantee of the external hard drive. However, if you are in a hurry to recover the data inside the hard drive, it is a perfectly feasible option. Especially if you have ever mounted a hard drive in an external enclosure. Of course, you will also have to take into account that both the external hard drive and the one you want to connect use the same type of internal data connector.
