Hard drive issue

[Senathor]

My computer has been quite broken to say the least for the past year and I finally decided to disassemble it for the hell of it becuase I don't use it and it's pretty terrible. I imagine the components inside it are of no relevant financial value by now anyway. My dad lives in Greece and unfortunately he can’t afford a new computer. He’s running an old laptop from 2004. It has the capacity to store up to 32GB which is essentially nothing these days. With that in mind I thought that I could perhaps give him the 1TB hard drive from my computer because I’m not going to use it. If I ever scramble up enough money to buy a new computer it’ll have another hard drive in it anyway. However there’s no normal USB port in that hard drive so I can’t connect it to my laptop to just see if it work properly. There’s a weird cable on it though but it does not fit in any of the ports on the laptop. Do I need to buy some other cable or does it simply not work that way?

It’s a Seagate Barracuda 7200. 12 1TB hard drive if that’s of any help. The weird cable I know nothing about has HDD SATA written on it. Can I perhaps buy a different version of that cable with a normal USB thingy on one end of it and connect it to the laptop that way?

Thanks in advance!

[chazus]

Something like this. SATA to USB converter

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...9SIA07R0Y82082

I'm a bit curious... 32gb seems small for 2004. 250-500gb hard drives were pretty standard even back then. Are you sure that isn't memory?

[Senathor]

Something like this. SATA to USB converter

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...9SIA07R0Y82082

I'm a bit curious... 32gb seems small for 2004. 250-500gb hard drives were pretty standard even back then. Are you sure that isn't memory?

What do you mean? He has like 30GB of stuff and 2GB left. Maybe he got sort of scammed.

[Cyrops]

Something like this. SATA to USB converter

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...9SIA07R0Y82082

I'm a bit curious... 32gb seems small for 2004. 250-500gb hard drives were pretty standard even back then. Are you sure that isn't memory?

I'm not sure about that, maybe in US. My laptop is from around the same period and it's 120GB or 64GB.

- - - Updated - - -

What do you mean? He has like 30GB of stuff and 2GB left. Maybe he got sort of scammed.

Maybe that is just C partition and he has another partition that is free, or it just isn't initialized.

[chazus]

Ah, I got confused. I thought he had a desktop, and you had a laptop.. But you both have laptops.

If that's the case, I'd probably get a legitimate hard drive enclosure, not just an adapter. Otherwise that thing will get damaged, especially if he's carrying it around and stuff.

[Annarion]

Basically what you have is meant to be placed inside the computer, and connected through the "weird cable" (SATA cable is the normal way of connecting hard drives to your computer.) Unfortunately the hard drive you has is designed to work inside a computer, and doesn't come with any protective casing, so it's not recommended to use it as an external drive. You could try putting an ad on whatever Craigslist analogue you have, and see if anyone would be willing to trade you a USB external drive for your existing internal drive. 1TB isn't bad even now, and you could probably find someone with a spare comparable drive to trade.

TL;DR: Yes you can, but no I don't recommend it. Try trading for an external drive.