A New Use for My Old Laptop Hard Drive

Earlier this year my laptop died. Yep; dead as a door nail. Kaput.

I was not happy since I spent much of that day working on a presentation only to get home and not be able to even turn on my laptop. Huge bummer! I feared the worst at first thinking my hard drive bit the dust. That wasn’t the problem. This laptop wasn’t even two years old when it failed. I was frustrated and angry, vowing never again to purchase an HP laptop.

Two very good things came out of this tragedy. First, I made the decision to buy my first Apple, a MacBook Pro, which I am extremely happy to own! I was worried about compatibility issues and the learning curve, but was pleasantly surprised to quickly realize neither of these two issues was going to be a problem. Sweet!

The second good thing that came out of this laptop failure was only realized recently. The laptop still had its hard drive intact. I knew that it was not damaged because I was able to safely copy everything off of it and install all the files on my new MacBook Pro. I also saw an advertisement online for the OCW external hard drives. They are enclosed in a hard plastic case with a heat sync to disipate any heat. I also saw they offered a kit to convert your own laptop hard drive into an external drive.

I was not sure if my exact drive would work, so I got onto an online chat with one of the reps. She was very helpful and looked up the model of my hard drive. Very quickly she got back to me, reporting that my drive would indeed work. Awesome! So, I purchased the kit and waited for it to arrive at my front door.

A few days later it arrived. I got to work with the kit. I had to remove one piece from my hard drive that helped hold it in place in the laptop. Then it was just a matter of inserting a few screws to assemble the drive in the hard plastic case. Now, with a USB wire I can attach the drive to my computer as an external hard drive with over 300GBs of space available! (Source: https://www.nettoyersonmac.fr/avis-onyx/)

I use this external hard drive to automatically create a backup when I am importing photos into my laptop with Lightroom. I also keep my favorite LR catalogs on this drive so they are with me wherever I go. I really like this new use for my old laptop hard drive!