Found an old hard drive

sparkmane_ · June 17, 2019

I found an old 2tb HDD earlier and I was wondering if I could put it into my system that is already made. The drive, from what I remember, has windows 8 on it and many, many old files I used to have. Would i be safe to put it in my pc as it is?

bellabichon · June 18, 2019

Depends what you consider old. HDDs are one of the few computer components that you're not supposed to buy used, because they're already pretty cheap, and you take on quite a bit of a liability of the drive failing later on. You're welcome to use it, but I can't recommend that you put any super important files on it, because its probability of failing would be quite a bit higher than your other drives.

Turtle Rig · June 18, 2019

9 minutes ago, sparkmane_ said:

I found an old 2tb HDD earlier and I was wondering if I could put it into my system that is already made. The drive, from what I remember, has windows 8 on it and many, many old files I used to have. Would i be safe to put it in my pc as it is?

Of course it is safe. Go to Disk Management and format the drive and your good to go. It might not show it in my computer unless you go to disk management and make it active and what not.

Boomwebsearch · July 26, 2019

On 6/17/2019 at 7:59 PM, sparkmane_ said:

many old files I used to have. Would i be safe to put it in my pc as it is?

On 6/17/2019 at 8:09 PM, bellabichon said:

but I can't recommend that you put any super important files on it, because its probability of failing would be quite a bit higher than your other drives.

Are you looking to retrieve the data stored at one point on the HDD or run it as an operating system drive or a data storage disk? I am not sure completely what you mean by "safe", is it pertaining to the drive damaging other components or about how well it could store data with reliability?

Most likely is not going to damage other components, the chance that it would damage other components is pretty much zero if installed properly (to that degree it is safe), although I would recommend to not store important files of value to you since hard drive failure is more likely especially given that the drive is already maybe close to 4.5+ years which makes the chance of failure high and reliability questionable. You definitely can use it although, treat it as you know that it could fail at any time without warning, and that you are 100 percent prepared for any loss of data from a failure of that drive. Because of the age of the drive, it is likely going to be slowed down a lot when compared to its performance new, so don't expect high performance from the drive and that the system retains its responsiveness.

On 6/17/2019 at 8:10 PM, Turtle Rig said:

Go to Disk Management and format the drive and your good to go.

Note that formatting the drive will remove all contents of data from the drive; basically it will delete everything on the disk. I am not sure if the OP wanted to use the drive again without the files on it, restore/backup the files, or use the drive as of being with the data in a new system. So, @sparkmane_ please clarify what you are planning to use the drive for, and we make be able to provide more suggestions/recommendations pertaining to which usage applications would be good to use the drive for and which would not ((ex. Using it as a storage drive in an external enclosure would not be recommended given the age of the drive, although if you want to use it for non-mission critical/important data like just to boot a computer and use it for like web browsing then it would be okay) (after you backup any important files that you would like to keep of course)).

Hope this information was helpful,

@Boomwebsearch