I have recently dismantled two old computers and kept the hard drives. I want to try to use these as external drives, but they have Windows OS systems installed. Will this cause any problems if I place them in caddies and only start them once my computer has booted? Further, one is marked 'SATA' and the other 'SATA 150'. What sort of caddies should I buy? Thanks in advance for any help
Mike
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You should have no problem putting either one of these drives in a SATA to USB hard drive enclosure. Some computers may try to boot off of these drives if connected during boot up but you can going into your computers BIOS. You'll know pretty quickly if this is the case because the computer will try to boot onto the old operating system and most likely will error out or crash.
Generally you hit DEL, F1 or F2 right when the computer first turns on to access these BIOS settings and change them if you need to. You want to make sure your internal hard drive is set to a higher boot priority then USB devices. Keywords to look for within the setup program to find this setting are Boot Sequence, Startup Sequence, Boot Priority, etc.
Most likely you can put either one of these drives in a USB drive enclosure that is SATA compatable and have no trouble accessing the data. SATA 150 is simply just the speed of the drive (150 Megabytes per second). Both drives should accept a standard SATA connection and work fine. These enclosures are readily available for around $40 - $80 from electronics retailers.
Arnak
Hi,
Yes you can do exactly that and no the operating system won't attempt to boot from the external drive even when they are on already.
The item you will require is an external usb 3.5" SATA caddy if the drives came out of a desktop pc.
All SATA types are backwardly compatible so you won't have any problems.
Arnak
Anonymous
I guess you would purchase a caddy that would accomadate SATA. Yes you can use them. To boot to, and use the OS, I doubt it. There would be some steps involved, like adding the partition/drive to the boot manager, etc. If it is just for storage, format them.
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