Top Tip Reusing old laptop hard drives

Analoguesat

Analoguesat

Administrator
Staff member
My Satellite Setup
TM 5402HD
Sky+ UK.
My Location
Scottish Borders
Ive had as couple of old 80GB sata laptop hard drives lying around for a while which were taken out of scrapped units.

So I bought one of these from amazon

http://tinyurl.com/nmqbdbg

dead easy to fit - the hard drives just slot in and you do two tiny screws up with the tiny screwdriver (both supplied)

Hook it up to your computer & remove any hidden partitions using diskpart, then format it.

Result - one external hard drive thats absolutely ideal for attaching to the TM5402 for recording purposes :D


Make sure the drive connections are sata not ide. (You can get ide caddies, and they work fine for moving files around but the data transfer rates are much lower and wouldnt be suitable for recording onto)




Two things to be aware of


1) You are re-using old drives so total drive failure is certainly an increased possibility. DONT have your sole copy of anything vitally important kept on one of these!


2) And be careful using diskpart - if you pick the wrong drive to work on you will trash your main computer!! Use at your own risk, guides can easily be found on line & no responsibility accepted if you erase your main computer hard drive!

 
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...and if you can afford 'em ...
use SSDs ..on your set top boxes.
Much less demand on the boxes psu.
not likely you'd used ones tho'..
rgds
VS
 
SSDs are a transformation to anything with a traditional hard drive.

Good tip there, Ross. I have a bunch of old laptop drives with a SATA > USB converter that I use for testing and/or backups of OS images etc. Very useful.
 
Ive fitted a few ssd's to the staff laptops at work - the lappies are at least 6 years old, but not used for anything too demanding. Its certainly sped them up a bit. They will never be top class machines but they will be usable for a few more years.

(I had to do something - most of them had 40GB hard drives fitted at new & were so full the anti virus wouldnt update! :D)
 
I have a Mushkin Chronos 120GB SSD in my C2D desktop, it's that speedy that even windows boots up to the desktop within 10 seconds, about the same as my Amiga A600 loading Workbench (fitted with a CF card acting as an SSD), but the latter's got less to load... :-rofl2

As for used HDDs from old laptops, external HDDs are a perfect use, but as mentioned, keep an eye on the condition of them, as you never know if they've been ridden hard or if they're ready to fall apart... :):)
 
2cvbloke said:
I have a Mushkin Chronos 120GB SSD in my C2D desktop, it's that speedy that even windows boots up to the desktop within 10 seconds, about the same as my Amiga A600 loading Workbench (fitted with a CF card acting as an SSD), but the latter's got less to load... :-rofl2
Click to expand...

I've still got my A1200 with an '060 board and a CF card, also boots very fast into Workbench.
 
timo_w2s said:
I've still got my A1200 with an '060 board and a CF card, also boots very fast into Workbench.
Click to expand...

Aside from the CF card, my A600 is pretty much bone-stock (no expansions, 2.04 37.350 ROM), though I just discovered today that it needs a re-cap job as one of the caps (C303 or C304) under the FDD has suffered diarrhoea and left an unpleasant wet mess around it, good thing I had a spare A600 with a decent (but older revision) motherboard to stand in for the bad board for now... :)
 
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