Using an Old SSD as External Storage 🖴 DIY in 5 Ep 142

Опубликовано 19 марта 2021, 17:00

Don’t get rid of your old internal drives, use them as external drives. You can save yourself money and repurpose it into usable external storage, rather than saving your pennies for a new external drive. To transform an internal drive to an external drive, you’ll need to make sure it’s protected from any real-world threats, like dust, dropping etc.

Why SSD?
When most people think of external storage, they typically think of external hard drives, traditional HDD drive technology. While you can find larger capacity storage at a more affordable price point, this type of storage is slower than SSD storage and is more prone to failing due to a drop or being tossed around in a bag because of the moving parts within. SSD storage on the other hand, has no moving parts and works faster, even though it can be more expensive. Therefore, turning your gently used internal SSD into an external SSD is such an appealing prospect.

Clone Your Data
The first thing you’ll want to do is to transfer all the data from the old drive to the new drive if you haven’t already. Be sure to purchase a drive that includes a cloning software kit to make that part of your life a bit easier. Kingston normally bundles with Acronis software for this very purpose. If you are upgrading your rig with a new NVMe SSD and now have s spare SATA SSD and you have simply updated for speed or capacity, you should be good to go. But, if you replaced your storage because the old one was faulty, know that it probably won’t work any better as external storage and you might take it to e-waste facility.

Find the Right Enclosure
Next, you’ll need to get an enclosure to house your storage, both for protection from outside elements and to help the drive communicate with more traditional external transfer methods like USB. Some portable enclosures you simply slide the drive in, others use a latch or a screwdriver. There’s specialty enclosures for M.2 SSDs and most come with either USB-A or USB-C connectors. If your computer supports USB-C and NVMe, be sure to use an NVMe M.2 enclosure for optimum performance. Check out this video for a step by step guide: youtube.com/watch?v=AKed1OdLwv...

Use Your New External SSD
After it’s all set to go, you’ll want to erase the data on the old drive either by deleting the old files or reformatting the drive. Again, if you want a step by step guide on how to reformat an SSD, we’ve got a video on that here: youtube.com/watch?v=oAUo0fI6V9...

Let us know what tech you’ve got sitting around that you want to repurpose and maybe we’ll put together a future episode.