What you need:Docking station; old hard drive Time required: From 30 minutes to several days
by Nik Rawlinson
This issue, we’ve been inspired by a letter we received from reader Joe Webber, who discovered some old hard drives while spring cleaning.
Realising he had no way to connect them to his PC, he wrote to ask whether we had any suggestions.
As luck would have it, we have several old drives that haven’t been touched for years. In some cases, we’ve lost their cables or power chargers. We could try finding replacements from the original manufacturers, online stores or secondhand websites, but as they’re all different and we don’t know what voltages they require, we’ve opted for another solution: a drive docking station. This will let us connect multiple drives in sequence for occasional use, or leave one or two connected for extended periods if we want to give them a useful second life.
1Choose a docking station
We’re using the Fideco USB 3.0 Dual Bay HDD Docking Station (£36 from Amazon, www. snipca.com/49541, pictured below). The reason we opted for this device over the many others on sale is that it has two slots that can accommodate two drives simultaneously, plus two front-mounted USB ports and an SD card slot. That means you can still use it even when you’re not connecting drives to it. If you install two drives, you can also clone from one to the other without connecting the dock to your PC.
If you don’t need these additional features, consider the cheaper Sabrent horizontal docking station with cover – £29 from www.snipca.com/49542, pictured below.
Both docks support SATA drives -
pictured right in the Fideco model. SATA stands for Serial AT Attachment, with the
AT in the middle coming from the name of the IBM AT (Advanced Technology) computer,
on which the interface first appeared. That computer was released in August 1984,
so the standard is approaching 40 years old, and is widely supported.
If you only have one drive to work with and you want either to keep it permanently attached or have the option of putting it away when not in use, you might be better served by a caddy than a dock. This is an enclosure that’s designed to be used for the long-term mounting of a single drive. It comes in sizes suitable for either 3.5in ‘desktop PC’ and 2.5in ‘laptop’ drives, and is often a cheaper option. We recommend this £10n U
