10 Ways To Recycle Your Hard Drive

So you have finally concluded that size does matter and installed a shiny new hard drive in your PC, what to do with the old one? Here are a few suggestions, some you’ve probably already considered, some perhaps not:

1.If you have the space inside your desktop then simply add the new drive and keep using the old one as well.

2.Take the old drive out and fit it into an external enclosure (inexpensive and easy to find on the usual sites) and voila! you have a portable external HDD at a greatly reduced cost.

3.Alternatively you can now buy a USB HDD ‘dock’ that allows you to simply slot in any IDE or SATA drive to use as extra storage.

4.Use the old drive as the storage in a ‘barebones’ Personal Video Recorder, these again are easy to find and are a lot cheaper as they come without a HDD inside.

5.Reserve your old drive for mp3 music tracks, and by using idea 1, 2 or 3 you can have your own PC jukebox

6.You could sell it on an internet auction site – but beware! you need to fully erase all your personal data from it first, simply deleting and formatting will still leave your data easily recovered by any nefarious individual that gets their hands on it! To safely sanitise your drive try Heidi Eraser or DBAN (Darik’s Boot And Nuke), both free to download

7.If you also have an old desktop case, monitor and keyboard etc, you could donate a complete system to someone you know who is perhaps a year or two beyond the digital generation, even a ‘state of the ark’ system (that works!) could still open up a whole new world to them and create a new ‘silver surfer’.

8.Alternatively donate the system to any of the many charities that pass on systems to the needy and/or the developing world (but remember to refer to number 6 above!)

9.With a few minutes work with a drill and the addition of cheap and easily available clock mechanism you could convert your HDD into a stylish timepiece.

10.Or, for no cost or effort at all simply use the drive as a paperweight, bookend or doorstop.