external USB hard drive Archives

How to convert a bare hard drive or SSD into an external USB drive

Posted on October 9, 2026

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Hard drives and SSDs are a bit on the expensive side these days so it makes sense to repurpose any bare drives you might have laying around and put them to good use.

If you have a working hard drive or SSD laying around you have a great option for putting it to good use: convert it into an external USB hard drive. All you need to do is purchase a very inexpensive external USB drive enclosure and plug your drive into it. It really is that simple. [Read more…]

Q&A: Which brand of USB hard drive do you recommend?

Posted on March 7, 2024

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Question from Phyllis: Hi there, Rick. I love your website and all of your handy tips.

I’m looking to buy an external USB hard drive so I can back up the hard drive in my laptop. I really want one that will last and maintain a good backup in case something happens to my laptop.

In your opinion, which brand of external hard drive is the best value for the money? [Read more…]

Review: Seagate Expansion 16TB Desktop USB 3.0 External Hard Drive

Posted on March 10, 2021

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Adding an external USB hard drive to your computer really makes it easy to create full backups of all your programs, photos, music and other files that reside on today’s massive hard drives.

And as we all know, with mass storage devices, bigger is always better.

The Seagate Expansion 16TB Desktop USB 3.0 External Hard Drive will likely hold everything you can pack on to your computer’s internal hard drive, and a whole lot more. [Read more…]

Q&A: Do you think I should I buy a used external USB hard drive?

Posted on September 11, 2020

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Question from Josh E.: I need to buy an external hard drive for my laptop. My friend wants to sell me a used, but working 1TB USB 2.0 drive for $5.

That’s plenty big enough for my needs and I really like the price, but if my laptop has USB 3.0 ports I’ll probably just go ahead and buy a new USB 3.0 drive to take advantage of the faster speed.

The problem is I don’t know whether the USB ports on my laptop (HP Pavilion dv3510nr) are USB 2.0 or USB 3.0 ports. How can I find out?

Also, do you recommend that I buy this external drive even if my laptop supports USB 3.0?

Rick’s answer: [Read more…]

Review: WD 1TB Black My Passport Portable USB 3.0 External Hard Drive

Posted on August 30, 2017

These days no computer system is complete without an external USB hard drive. These handy gadgets are simply perfect for making local backups and for handling so many other handy mass storage tasks.

External hard drives used to be quite expensive, but their prices have now dropped to where they are easily affordable, even with today’s massive storage capacities.

I recently had a chance to check out the WD 1TB Black My Passport Portable USB 3.0 External Hard Drive (#ad), and it didn’t take long to figure out why it’s the best selling external USB hard drive on Amazon.

This awesome drive from Western Digital easily fits in my shirt pocket, yet it’s super fast and stores a full terabyte of data. Thanks to its speedy USB 3.0 interface, it made quick work of backing up both the 120GB SSD and 750GB hard drive on my Desktop PC. [Read more…]