I want to caution you about transferring software. Once you’ve installed the drive in the appropriate type of enclosure (a screwdriver is really the only tool you’ll need), all you do then is connect it via USB to any computer (and perhaps to power) and you’ll be able to access the data on it. The external drive enclosure you get must match the drive you have. Particularly on very old machines, you may run into IDE. Almost all drives on newer machines are SATA, and even when they’re not, newer machines include SATA interfaces. There are two primary disk interfaces these days: SATA (on the left, above) and IDE (on the right). The two hard drive interface types: SATA and IDE (aka PATA). The external enclosure you select needs to match the physical size of the old drive you’re about to put in it. Two common sizes of hard disk drives.īy size in this case, I mean the physical size of the drive. There are two things you need to know before purchasing an external USB enclosure. That’s essentially what external USB drives are: hard drives in an enclosure, providing power and a circuit board to provide the USB-to-hard drive interface. A more flexible approach: the external driveĪ more flexible approach I prefer instead is to take the drive out of the old computer and install it into an external USB drive enclosure. There’s no “one way” to do it it varies based on the type of computer and hard disk you have. It does mean opening up your PC and connecting the old drive in the right way in the right place. The downside is, you need to be somewhat computer-hardware literate to install the drive. Once you’re done copying the files you want to keep, you can leave the old hard drive in the new machine, reformat it, and use the extra disk space for whatever you like. Once it’s set up, copying files from old to new is easy and fast. What used to appear as the C: drive on the old computer might now appear as the D: drive on the new one. We’ll take a hard drive from an old computer and install it as the second drive in a new one. This is a fairly common approach used by computer geeks. You will not be able to transfer installed applications or Windows itself.

Consider instead placing it into an external enclosure to make it a USB drive.You may be able to install it internally if the interfaces are compatible.You can almost certainly remove the hard drive from an older machine and attach it to a newer machine.

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