Make A Hard Drive Into An External Hard Drive?

I have a Dell Computer as well as a Dell Laptop. I also have two Hard drives that I took from a couple old computers before I discarded them.
I am curious.

Question
1: How would I go about making the old hard drives into external hard drives?
2: How do I bridge the external hard drives to the existing computers I now have?
I hope these questions give enough details to help me.

 

Search for USB external enclosure, from your favorite online retailer.

 

Welcome to the forum! One method is to use external enclosures and then connect them to the existing systems via USB. I assume one of the drives is a 2.5 inch (notebook) and one is 3.5 " (desktop). You will need to format the drive (I would also run a utility to check them for errors also; seatools for DOS should work on most brands). SeaTools | Seagate
I am using one of these for a 2.5 " drive and am very happy with it http://www.amazon.com/Vantec-SuperSpeed-2-5-Inch-Enclosure-NST-280S3-BK/dp/B003JNUHDK

Do you plan to use the drives for data storage and/or backups?

 

I agree with the above. You need a device called a USB enclosure, even premade external HDDs are only simply a proprietary enclosure .
You basically find one that suits your needs (i.e. Aluminium for the sexy professional look etc). They are plentiful and cost around $25-$35
However, if you want to ever put an SSD in the enclosure, you need to find one that has an ASMedia 1051E bridge controller or better in order to push full UASP compatibility to allow SATA3 SSDs to perform at their best. I'm a little out of date in this regard (some more ppl will chime in) but I can personally recommend the Silverstone Raven RVS02 which definitely has that ASMEDIA chipset.

 

Answer first three questions to define which HDD-case is best for you

what type interface have your HDD's have IDE, SATA 1.5/3.0/6GB?

what type of interface do you want to use, does your notebook have?

- Firewire,
- USB 2.0 or 3.0,
- SATA/eSATA/eSATAp

In case you only have a slow interface,do you have an expresscard or cardbus slot to connect an external HDD-case

 

The original poster was a spammer, and never cared about your answers. The post contained hidden image spam, of the same family as described here -- and linking to the same spam site as similar recent spam posts.

Ordinarily we delete spam posts, but I'll leave this to preserve the great responses.

When you see posts that seem real, but are almost too generic, too benign, try and click "Reply with Quote", that will reveal the hidden links (I've cleaned them from the above post). Just report such posts and we'll whack the moles. Thank you for your help making NBR a great place, both with your helpful answers and with such reports!

 

To make it even harder to spot, sometimes spam links/images are edited afterwards into their messages.

 

Yeah their creativity is endless. This most recent batch of hidden image spam uses a different scheme, where they just post these threads with trivial and innocent sounding questions, each containing a single image referenced through a link shortener. Initially the image is just a single pixel and thus invisible. But since they use the same link shortener in many posts, they can update that image centrally to suddenly reveal a spam payload in many existing posts on different forums -- without updating the posts, and even if the spammers have since been banned. That's why we have to edit out the link, even in cases (such as this thread) where the original spam post is kept visible.