Summary: External hard drives are handy and portable, but occasionally it might be nice to move all that storage into your PC. You probably can.
Is it possible to use my external hard drive as an internal hard drive? I have an XTRA DISK external hard drive with a Western Digital WD300 enhanced IDE hard drive. I would like to make it an internal hard drive.
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In most cases the answer is a resounding yes. In fact, I've done exactly this myself.
However, there are a few caveats to be aware of.
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Most external hard drives are simply standard hard drives in a box with an additional circuit board that converts their SATA or IDE interface into a USB or Firewire interface. Add an external power supply, or "brick" and it's very simple, and a very handy use of the technology.
So yes, you can open the case, and you'll likely find a standard hard drive that you can then install directly into your PC.
Some things to be aware of, though:
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This voids the manufacturer's warranty. After you break the seal and open the box, you're on your own.
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Be sure it has the interface you expect. I recently opened up one of my external hard drives to find out that it had a SATA interface, rather than the expected IDE interface.
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It won't be one of your faster drives. My expectation is that drive manufacturer's use their slower drives in external boxes. Not only because the drive speed is typically no longer the limiting factor when placed behind a USB or Firewire interface, but because slower drives run cooler, and external drive boxes rarely include cooling fans.
With all those caveats in mind, this is exactly what I did when one of my external drives went bad. I removed it from the USB enclosure and installed it into a PC where I ran several disk recovery tools in an attempt to avoid data loss. Once completed, I decided to leave it in the PC and simply shared it out for use by other machines on my LAN.
Note that the reverse is also true: you can purchase external hard drive kits without the hard drive. This is another great way to lengthen the life of a hard drive should its hosting machine die or become obsolete for other reasons. By extracting the hard drive and placing it in an external enclosure, the drive becomes portable and easily usable on any number of other machines.
As a side note, as you move hard drives from external enclosures to an internal installation, or vice-versa, the formatting and contents will likely be preserved. Having done this a time or two, in each case the data that was on my hard drive was preserved and immediately available in its new configuration.
Related:
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Ask Leo! - What backup program should I use?
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Ask Leo! - How should I erase my hard drive before I give it away?
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Ask Leo! - Your hard disk is more likely to fail than you think.
Article C3121 - August 19, 2007
I have taken many internal drives and placed them in external USB enclosures, and they have always kept their contents. (Or, at least, they didn't lose anything else. Several of these were from non-booting Windows systems, and nearly all the data was recoverable once moved to another computer.)
Whether one can move a USB drive between Windows and Macs, on the other hand, I have no clue.
Posted by: Ken at August 22, 2007 6:40 AMHow about the reverse? I have a removable internal IDE HD (D:) but when I replace it, I have to reboot. Can I make it a USB plug and play?
Posted by: William at October 15, 2008 8:49 AMThanks
Leo,
The power adapter (ad6008) of my WD harddrive has shut down. This adapter supplies 5V and 12V to the drive by a din plug. Is it still possible to use the drive internally?
Thank you for the reply.
Posted by: Arjen at December 4, 2008 12:17 PMLeo,
Posted by: Karl Krautscheid at January 12, 2009 12:27 PMI have a cable to convert an IDE HD to USB.
I would like to put this into my computer case and power it with the computers power supply.
My question is:
Can I cut the 5 volt cable and ad a toggle switch to turn the drive off when not in use?
Will My Computer see the drive when I turn the power back on?
Thanks for the reply.
i have a Maxtor SATA external HDD and i wanted to convert it into an internal...how can i do this? as the slave connector port is on a seperate board, i dont see any way to connect this? plz help!
Posted by: chris at February 2, 2009 12:57 PMI have a WD5000aajs external hard drive that has about a hundred gigs of music on it and my fiance plug the wrong power adapter into to it on accident. Was wandering if there is any way to hook it up to my desktop so I can atleast get my music off?? Would appreciate any help you can give me!
Thanks Alot
14-Mar-2009
hey,I want to make my USB hard drive an internal one because it keeps getting disconnected.Its a transcend storejet 25p USB hard drive.So can you tell me what the problem is and please tell me whether games can be run on a USB external hard drive.
Posted by: anirudh at May 17, 2009 5:24 AMRecently my external hardrive off 1TB wasqnt detected by windows anymore so i opened it and inside where 2 SATA drives off 500GB each, so i hooked them up to my pc to try and recover the data but it seems that only 1 drive has the filesystem on it from both drives.
Do you know of any way i can still recover the data from both cause datarecovery programs only manage to get around 5% off data off the second drive cause they cant detect the system (wich is FAT32)
Posted by: Ignis at July 21, 2009 10:52 PMYes you can connect a USB as an internal drive. I used a seagate 320Gb laptop drive as an internal backup drive in my Windows Home Server. I did not open the case so I do not know what the interface is, I suspect it is SATA. I cut a Mini D cable that I had laying around to about 10 inches long. I built a 10 pin header (with a key pin) from components to plug it into the motherboard. I siamesed both ports power leads to keep adequate wattage to the drive even under heavy use(there is only 500ma per port doubled to 1000ma or 5 watts). I also added an external switch to the harness so I can turn it off for secure storage. I did not remove the case and I can remove the drive simply by unplugging it from the harness. This also means I did not void the warranty. Works great and can be turned on at any time, just make sure you disconnect it (in windows) before turning it off. I also tried this with a mybook 160Gb drive (12v/IDE interface board 3.5" drive). I removed the case and covered the interface board to prevent a short. Modified the power plug to connect it to a spare hard drive power. It also worked great, matter of fact it responded faster than before. I believe this was due to the really short USB cable compared to the original 6 footer it came with. Just remember this is a USB interface and it is not going to be fast, but is a good backup and streams music just fine. There are many resources on the net to figure out the wiring.
Posted by: Lobo at August 4, 2009 6:45 PMYes you can connect a USB as an internal drive. I used a seagate 320Gb laptop drive as an internal backup drive in my Windows Home Server. I did not open the case so I do not know what the interface is, I suspect it is SATA. I cut a Mini D cable that I had laying around to about 10 inches long. I built a 10 pin header (with a key pin) from components to plug it into the motherboard. I siamesed both ports power leads to keep adequate wattage to the drive even under heavy use(there is only 500ma per port doubled to 1000ma or 5 watts). I also added an external switch to the harness so I can turn it off for secure storage. I did not remove the case and I can remove the drive simply by unplugging it from the harness. This also means I did not void the warranty. Works great and can be turned on at any time, just make sure you disconnect it (in windows) before turning it off. I also tried this with a mybook 160Gb drive (12v/IDE interface board 3.5" drive). I removed the case and covered the interface board to prevent a short. Modified the power plug to connect it to a spare hard drive power. It also worked great, matter of fact it responded faster than before. I believe this was due to the really short USB cable compared to the original 6 footer it came with. Just remember this is a USB interface and it is not going to be fast, but is a good backup and streams music just fine. There are many resources on the net to figure out the wiring.
Posted by: michael at November 16, 2009 5:20 PM