Hard to flash?

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I was wondering-is a good idea to make your old hard drive a "portable" drive?

I have to get some stuff off of my old 250gb hard drive from my old emachine (stupid motherboards), and while talking to someone, they suggested it. They would encase it, and add USB to it so I could use it to back up the pictures of my son's first year. I think they said it could be done for 35 bucks? I was already planning on buying a portable hard drive anyways...


What do you guys think? Good idea? Bad?
 
Are doing doing it because you want it portable or just because you want a back up drive?

You could just install it in the new machine as a second hard drive and use it for back ups.
 
I have 9 old drives, ranging in capacity from 8GB - 160GB, that I use for backups and miscellaneous storage; although nothing mission critical: Mostly music and video collection backups, incremental backups of work-in-progress projects, etc.

I have 4 PATA -> USB converters, and just plug them into the drives when needed.

It's a good idea because it makes use of the storage capacity you have. Even if you don't use the old drives day in and day out, they can come in handy at times when you need to clear off data or archive stuff, or need temporary storage when working on another drive.

If it could be called a bad idea in any regard, it would be because the drives have presumably used up a good portion of their workable life, and are simply that much closer to their demise than a new drive would be.
 
Originally Posted By: ZZman
You could just install it in the new machine as a second hard drive and use it for back ups.


But then the drive is a susceptible to system failure (bad power supply frying anything and everything, a drop/ impact on the computer case, etc.), and is also vulnerable to OS filesystem corruption, system intrusion and overall buggery... the drive would also always be spinning, wearing it down.

Keeping the backup disk(s) - If that is, indeed, the role the old drive(s) are intended to play - as far away from the primary copy is best. I keep one backup of everything important on an external drive out of the room and unplugged to mitigate against power issues and physical destruction (even floods or fires, within reason); and I keep a copy of most stuff on a Amazon S3 account "in the cloud". Amazon charges $0.15/ GB/ month for storage. Windows even offers "Skydrive" and gives you 25GB for free, but no file can exceed 50MB.
 
The only thing I really worry about is OS failure that then screws you up on getting your stuff off that drive. With back ups stored on a second internal with no OS to worry about most of the worry is eliminated.
 
If it is just going to be used for some pics buy a cheap flash drive and put it away or keep it on your key chain so you can show them to family, friends when you visit or they visit.
 
I'll throw a bit more in here:

It's will be strickly to back up pictures of the family, and stuff that I will need for school ( Planning to head back for my masters in the fall)

So most of the time it will be out of sight, and put away.


I need to make sure it is out of sight, or my 11 month old will find it and drop it a few times...
 
Originally Posted By: ZZman
If it is just going to be used for some pics buy a cheap flash drive and put it away or keep it on your key chain so you can show them to family, friends when you visit or they visit.


I would but my family takes to many pictures...I think I would lose that many flash drives...
grin2.gif
 
Originally Posted By: ZZman
Are doing doing it because you want it portable or just because you want a back up drive?

You could just install it in the new machine as a second hard drive and use it for back ups.



Portable.


With my luck with computers, I would ending up losing both drives...
 
I use an old hardrive in exactly the same way you are planning. it works well. I turn the hardrive on to mirror/backup the files I don't want to loose then turn it off.
 
If you are not using it all the time then by all mean do it. No need for a full enclosure. Just a USB to IDE/ATA/SATA cable with power supply is sufficient.
 
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