Turn your old laptop SSD or HDD into an external drive with this £6 enclosure
A great way to repurpose old drives.
Here's an idea! You know that 2.5-inch laptop drive that you have sitting around ever since you upgraded a year or two back? How about repurposing it as a portable SSD or HDD with this USB-C enclosure? For £6, you can give that drive a new lease on life. Your new drive will be useful too, ideal for backups, moving video files to your TV or just moving game directories between PCs.
n.b. Face in image above is unrelated, I just wanted to fill out the space without drawing attention to the USB cables that stop at the edge. Thanks to my pal Ross for the illustration.
This is also a super useful piece of kit to have on hand if you're upgrading a laptop with a 2.5-inch drive bay, as you can plug the new drive into this enclosure, clone your existing drive onto the new one using software like Acronis or Clonezilla, then swap the drives - new one inside the laptop, old one in the enclosure as a backup or to wipe clean to use anew.
There's not much else to say here, so I'll just mention that I've had one of these enclosures from Orico for a little while, and it's proven quite useful - the small form factor design works with both HDDs and SSDs, but going solid state means that you get a much more durable (eg magnet/shock resistant) device, one that's silent and one that's much faster too. Still, even hard drives are much nicer to deal with if you're backing up stuff to them, as you can get on with your regular computer business and just let it toil away in the background.
Overall, this is a nice pickup that can allow you to get more life out of the stuff you already have, which is nice - and it certainly beats spending big bucks on a purpose-made external drive.
We'll be back with more PC deals as we find them, so stay tuned - have a good one!