A Silly Hard Drive Question

[Russic]

So I'm suddenly in need of some internal hard drives. I have several externals laying around. Would I run into any problems if I opened up the casing of my external hard drives and removed the drive from inside? My extremely limited knowledge of them leads me to believe an external is just an internal with a casing and the appropriate guts to read via usb. Is that correct?

[bomber317]

Originally Posted by Russic

So I'm suddenly in need of some internal hard drives. I have several externals laying around. Would I run into any problems if I opened up the casing of my external hard drives and removed the drive from inside? My extremely limited knowledge of them leads me to believe an external is just an internal with a casing and the appropriate guts to read via usb. Is that correct?

Yes. Just make sure the drive you're taking out of your external casing is the same type of drive. ie: SATA or IDE and the right size as well, 2.5" vs 3.5" (notebook size vs desktop size)

On another note, if your old external HD isn't working, make sure it's the drive that isn't working and not the casing itself (usually for the 3.5" ones that come with a power supply, they have parts that can fail)

[Russic]

Originally Posted by bomber317

Yes. Just make sure the drive you're taking out of your external casing is the same type of drive. ie: SATA or IDE and the right size as well, 2.5" vs 3.5" (notebook size vs desktop size)

On another note, if your old external HD isn't working, make sure it's the drive that isn't working and not the casing itself (usually for the 3.5" ones that come with a power supply, they have parts that can fail)

Thank you very kindly, this is excellent news. When in doubt ... CP.