NAND flash-based storage has edged out other storage formats. In personal computers, SSDs have completely established themselves both in new equipment and in equipment upgrades. But can hard drives be recovered for other types of jobs? The quick answer is yes, and in more ways than one which we will remind you of in this practical exercise.

If you’ve been around consumer computing for a while, you’ve probably got old hard drives around your home or office that you replaced when you upgraded your desktop or laptop, or you’ve left them in an old console or other devices. If they don’t have a physical problem that prevents them from working properly, they can be used for various tasks.

To keep in mind before you begin

When recovering hard drives, there are several main issues to consider in order to decide what tasks we can convert them for. Size of hard drives is one of the keys. The most normal is that we have hard drives with standard sizes of 3.5 and 2.5 inches. The former were (and are) generally used in desktop computers, while the 2.5-inch ones were intended for laptops. As for the thicknesses, we find 12.5, 9 and 7 mm. The latter will be the most suitable if we want to use the external drive on the go due to their smaller size and weight, while the former will certainly offer us a larger storage capacity. In both cases we can have adapters.

The second problem is the question interface internal connection to the motherboard. We can meet the oldest PAW (also known as IDE) that dominated the market from the 1980s to the turn of the century or state-of-the-art SATA which were introduced in 2003. If we had to choose, we would of course bet on the latter because they offer us higher performance.

With reference to external connection interface We have to consider the one we intend to use to connect it, be it USB, FireWire, eSATA and even Thunderbolt. eSATA is very, very fast because it connects directly to the computer’s SATA interface. The problem is that it is not available on many computers. The same can be said for the Thunderbolt, plus there’s little to offer. In the case of FireWire, it will certainly be an option if we use our external drive best with Apple equipment. In all cases, the most profitable option for an external interface will be the use of USB, which is a standard supported by almost any device.

How to recover hard drives

Use as external disk It’s a natural destination for our old hard drives. We may use them to store and transfer data; store backups; use them as bootable media to install operating systems or for entertainment content that, when connected to a router or smart TV, allows us to watch movies or series on the local network. We can convert our hard drive to an external drive in several ways:

– Cable. The simplest of all is a single cable that connects the hard drive interface (and power) to an external port on a desktop or laptop computer. It’s an unsightly solution to look at and also to transport, so we’d only use it on a computer desk. Of course, it couldn’t be easier and very cheap, because you can get them for just 6 euros.

– One base. More expensive than a simple cable, but more versatile and aesthetic is the connection base or dock. Its use is as simple as “snapping” the hard drives into their cases and connecting the base to the PC. They generally offer multiple bays for 2.5- or 3.5-inch drives, which are the ones you may have removed from laptops or desktops, and can handle multiple interfaces. It is primarily aimed at use on a computer desk (or in the living room to connect to a router, streamer or TV), although like the previous one it can be carried around and used on different computers. The offer is wide in all price ranges, starting from 20 euros.

– Case. If we are going to restore the hard drives individually, it is most elegant to use a cabinet where we will place the drive. It contains its own circuitry and just removes a few screws and installs. There are 3.5-inch drives on offer, as well as 2.5-inch drives, which are the best solution if we want to use it as a portable hard drive that we are going to move from the desk. Its price is very cheap, from only 10 euros.

Next to SSD

SSDs are increasing storage capacity and dropping prices, but hard drives are still unbeatable for price per GB. Many users who use desktop computers and need a lot of capacity follow the strategy of connecting hard drives next to SSDs to cover both worlds, performance and capacity.

In this way, we can use a small and cheap SSD, which we will use as a boot disk and where we will put the operating system and the main applications that use hard disks as mass storage. In this scenario, a good option is to use multiple hard drives in a RAID, bringing their performance closer to that of an SSD. It is not unusual for laptops that we can use the same strategy, a PCIe SSD as a boot drive and a 2.5″ hard drive.

Use in NAS

These devices, which add storage and networking technologies, are another good place to recover hard drives. And the fact is that NAS have their own hardware, operating systems and applications, which allows them to function independently of PCs and operating systems and run on virtually any infrastructure.

Moreover, in these devices, capacity is prioritized more than the performance of the storage units, as the latter is largely determined by the network used. We can use them as a media server; P2P client; Video surveillance; Backing up… and generally setting up a private cloud that we can access from anywhere in the world via the internet.

To create bootable media

We have already seen above how easy it is to convert an internal hard drive to an external drive. However, it cannot be used only for data storage and another great option is to use it to create bootable media with multiple operating systems. As with NAS, we don’t need stratospheric performance here because we’ll always have USB limitations. Taking into account the large storage capacity of hard drives, we can put anything we want on them.

Console and entertainment

The internal storage capacity of video game consoles is usually quite limited considering the large amount of space that large games take up. It would be ideal to expand them with an SSD, but their price is high. Most consoles have USB ports that can be used to connect external hard drives and increase their capacity. If you can sacrifice a bit of performance (basically game load time) you can have very high capacity on a console for a very low cost.

The same can be said about using it for other types of entertainment, such as storing movies or series that we can watch by connecting the unit directly to a smart TV. Here the performance section is trivial and we will have the same experience as when using solid storage.