I have a dell inspiron 2650 with 20GB hard drive. i'm looking to buy some more storage and would just like some advice on what to get! my friend has a 60GB internal hard drive which she doesnt need, but her laptop was (its broken,she just got a new one) a compaq. apparently i can get a kit to adapt this into an external hard drive? will this work, as they are different makes of laptop? and is an external hard drive what i want? i just want somewhere to store my music and videos really, as i've run out of space on the 20GB i've already got. i also want to go for the cheapest option really. any help would be greatly appreciated, as i really dont want to buy the wrong thing! thanks very much, lesley.

Hi,

It sounds like you are looking to purchase an adaption kit which will take your friend's internal hard drive, and make an external hard drive out of it for you to use on your laptop, and you are wondering if it will work, and if there is a problem with using a non-compaq hard drive with a compaq computer. Sound right? Hope so...

First off, there is no problem with using any PC hard drive with any PC, compaq or otherwise. The costs of maintaining specific types of drives would be outrageous to say the least. There is a difference between hard drives used for laptops and hard drives used for desktops. Laptop hard drives are much smaller in side and have different connectors.

As far as these adaption kits go, I didn't find any in my quick search which work with "laptop hard drives" so your friend's hard drive would need to be a regular 3.5" desktop type of hard drive to work in these kits. For example this one http://www.xpcgear.com/3slusb20exat.html would take any PC hard drive and make it an External USB connected hard drive. Which is a great idea, and for $30.00 I might buy a couple of these myself. (I'm not recommending that this is the best one for you, I'm just using it as a reference for answering your question).

To avoid confusion, yes, using a PC Desktop hard drive in this fashion will work fine with your laptop as a USB connected external drive. It doesn't have to be a laptop hard drive or a compaq drive for this kit to work for you.

The setup looks very simple as well. You take the hard drive out of her computer, put it in the case, and hook it up. Hooking it up will be simple too, there is only one way the power plug and ribbon cable can go on. If you look at the ribbon cable, you will see in the middle of the row of holes, there is one hole that is not there. Looking at the hard drive you will see that in its row of posts/prongs, there is one missing on the bottom row in the middle. That's how you know if the ribbon is right-side up or not. Very simple. The power plug is shaped so that it can only go in one way ... so again, very simple.

Once you have that setup, you plug the case into the wall. Then you can connect the USB cable from the drive to your laptop.

Some of these kits say that they don't need external power, but if you look at them closely you will see that they are also running on FireWire connections, not USB connections. If your laptop has a Firewire port, then this will work great, but it probably doesn't. Most of them don't, especially those that come with 20 gig drives. If you don't know what Firewire is, then you probably don't have it on your laptop. You will need the USB connection.

I haven't seen any for USB connection which don't require you to plug into the wall as well. Perhaps there are some, but I didn't see any on my quick search.

One tip though if you do find one, and are using your laptop battery, the battery drain is going to be quite a bit using the external drive, Firewire or USB.

On that page I linked to for the kit they have a warning there about not installing drivers. Heed that warning. If it doesn't work, if your laptop doesn't pop up and say that it found an external storage drive and it is installing it, then you might need to do some trouble shooting, but XP should install it with no problem at all, and a Mac would also find it right away.

This is a great idea. $30 to use a drive you already have as an external drive for your laptop is a great money saving way to go. A 60 gig external drive costs about 130 - 200, so you are saving yourself quite a bit of money.

If you are not familiar with trouble shooting problems I would also suggest getting this kit from a computer store in your area, rather than online. That way you can return it if it doesn't work, or get some help using it from a local source. I don't think you will need either of these resources, but since I'm handing out advice today, thought I would go all the way. :-)

Have a great day!

Glenn Hefley

(look for Glenn's Articles on D-A-L!)

Thank you so so much, that was so helpful. I will definitely try and get this adaptor kit, althought i think i'm going to give my friend some money for her hard drive, so it wont be quite as cheap as you thought but still pretty good! this website is such a brilliant idea, the times that i've needed advice and there's jst been no-one to ask! thanks again, lesley xxx

I'm selling external USB hard disks on the D-A-L Trader (click the Auctions tab at the top of the screen) for exactly this purpose. You might find that buying one of my brand new, pre-made ones works out cheaper than buying your friend's plus a kit plus delivery. However, if you particularly want to buy the used hard disk from your friend and aren't confident about setting it up in an adaptor kit, I would be happy to quote you to set it up

Something that might interest you as well is the article we have on System Backups.
http://www.d-a-l.com/articles/library/82.html

Hope all is well with your purchase, and have a great day!

Glenn