How to re-purpose an old hard drive for less than £10

If you’ve been following my last article Upgrading my first PC then you will know that after upgrading the inbuilt 2.5" hard drive to an SSD (Solid State Drive), I ended up with a spare traditional spinning hard drive. Since the performance of this hard drive is not fast enough to run a modern day PC and I don’t want to dump the hard drive as it will end up in landfill which has a massive environmental impact I am going to re-purpose the drive for something else. So today I’m going to show you how to turn your old hard drive into a USB backup drive. This drive is perfect for taking daily backups of your PC and files as well as backing up photos or using it as a travel hard drive to share large files with friends and family.

This process is broken down into three steps;

1. Connect the drive to your PC externally
2. Format the drive
3. Backup or copy your data

Please bear in mind that you do these steps at your own risk.

Connect the drive to your PC externally

So the first thing you will need to do is decide how you want to connect the drive to your PC. There is a couple of ways you can do this, however I have opted for placing the drive into an external USB drive bay for a 2.5" SATA hard drive. I opted for this method over a simple cable as the enclosure for this portable hard drive provides a basic level of protection and is more practical than a desktop drive bay, should I chose to carry it around.

I bought this particular hard drive bay for £5.98 from eBay but the drive came from China and therefore took almost a month to arrive. If you are looking for one locally sourced then they range in price from £10 to £20 but since I wanted to make this project as inexpensive as possible I opted to buy this external drive bay from China.

The first thing you want to do is to open up the case and push the hard drive into the SATA connector. This is quite easy to do however be careful not to bend the board inside the enclosure. This step will vary depending on which hard drive bay you buy.

Next we close the drive up and connect the included USB cable. Some drives may come with a double USB cable with one port to connect to the hard drive enclosure and two to go into your PC. This is because some older USB ports won’t give out enough power to run the hard drive.

Next connect it to a USB port on your computer. If your computer is fitted with a USB 3 port connect to this port to get the best speed out of your external hard drive. To identify a USB 3 port look out for the blue colour in the port. Note not all computers will have a USB 3 port, however the drive should work in older USB ports.

Formatting the Disk

The next stage is to format the drive. I am going to do this in Windows 10 as this is the OS on my computer. Once we have plugged in the drive we can open up our file explorer app and click on ‘This PC’ in the left navigation panel. This will take us to a window that will show us the active connected drives on this machine. In our case the new hard drive has shown up as two drives. One with our old windows drive on it and one as a backup drive. Since I no longer need either of these drives I am going to format them into one large empty drive. To begin the format the first thing you will need to do is press the windows key and type in ‘create and format hard disk’. This will bring up the windows app that will allow you to format your drive.

In our case this hard drive is showing up as Disk 2 which is split into four partitions. Since I no longer need this partition I am going to format all four of the partitions and turn it into one giant drive.

I will do this by clicking the right hand mouse button on each drive one at a time and selecting ‘Delete Volume’ from the menus. You will then be asked if you are sure if you want to delete the partition. Please note that doing this may cause you to lose your data on the selected drive.

Once you have deleted all the drives you can then click the right hand mouse button on the unallocated space and select ‘New simple partition’. This will open up a window that will guide you through the steps of creating a new partition to store your files. I am just going to stick to the defaults and keep clicking next.

Once you have done everything reopen file explorer and your drive should appear.

Backup or copy your data

You can now copy and back up files to this drive. You can do this by first creating a folder on the drive called ‘Backup’. Then select the files and folders you want to copy and right click on them and select copy. Then go to the new backup folder on the external drive and when inside the folder right click and press paste. This will create a copy of the files you selected into the new drive.

I am going to use this hard drive to back up my home videos from my laptop in case something happens to my laptop I will always have a backup at home, however alternatively you could use the hard drive to take your files from home to a friend or family members house. Why not try copying home videos or photos to the hard drive and connecting it to your grandmothers TV so she can watch videos or view photos of the family if you don’t need a backup drive? Some routers allow you to connect a drive via USB that can then be setup as a network drive so you can back up your photos from any computer in your house or store videos on it and watch it from any smart TV in yours house.

Let me know what you would use an external spare hard drive for in the comments section below and if you enjoyed this article consider following me on Medium, Instagram or twitter.