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A while back I wrote this post that explains how to convert an unused internal hard drive into an external USB 3.0 drive.
That has turned out to be one of the most popular posts I have ever written, but a lot has changed since then.
Question from Karen: I have several old computers in my basement that I want to recycle.
I’ve always heard that you need to destroy a computer’s hard drive before you recycle it to prevent someone else from maybe getting your files.
My question is will removing the hard drive from a PC completely eliminate any possibility of someone finding my old files.
Question from Roger: Rick, I followed your advice and replaced the hard drive in my laptop with a solid state drive (SSD).
I’m absolutely blown away by how much faster the laptop boots up and how much faster my programs load.
I do have one question though. I read in another forum that SSDs don’t get fragmented and they never need to be defragged. Is that true?
Rick’s answer: [Read more…]
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Question from Kristen: The hard drive in my laptop has stopped working and I need to take it somewhere to have it fixed.
I’ve been taking your advice about creating regular System Image backups and I have a fairly recent backup they can use to restore everything once the bad hard drive is replaced.
What worries me is I have a lot of really personal photos that were backed up along with everything else. Will a tech be able to see them? [Read more…]
Question from Marvin: I read your article about upgrading a computer by adding an SSD to make it run faster.
The following weekend I went to Best Buy and bought a 1TB SSD and cloned the contents of the existing 500GB hard disk onto it.
I then wiped the hard drive and installed the SSD in the computer, leaving the now-blank hard drive in place to store my data files on.
Everything works perfectly but something has me baffled. When I look in the BIOS it says the hard drive is set as the boot drive.
How is this machine booting into Windows when the boot drive is blank?