New Life for an Old Hard Drive

[Dietrick_K]

I have a few older hard drives that I want to use as redundant drives for miscellaneous data storage and experimentation. some of the hard drives are old in the since they were manufactured back in 2010.

I am wondering if these hard drives will still work with my current system, as in I don't need any special interpreter to be able to use these drives.

 

My second question is that since I do not know what is on these drives and am worried about any possible malware or viruses. Is there a way I can still hook up these drives to my computer directly with no expansion ports or benches, with no risk of getting the virus on my main system drives. Like a UEFI clean sweep before boot cycle or factory resetting the drive wile it is in a quarantine mode of some sort.

[njmyers3]

If the drives are from 2010 they should be using SATA, so you can just connect that to your PC like a modern drive.

I'm not gonna say that it's impossible for malware on the drives to infect your system, but it's extremely unlikely. Unless you already have malware on your system that could execute it, or you execute it, it has no way of running. Also, malware from 2010 is unlikely to affect a modern operating system, even with Windows Defender as the antivirus.

[Droidbot]

Plug them in via SATA, and then don't boot to OS. Instead, run a program like Darik's Boot and Nuke and nuke them from orbit. 

 

They should work fine, but it depends on what drives they actually are - As long as they're not IDE they should work fine on a modern system. 

[Sauron]

If they can plug into your motherboard, they should work. Sata is fully retrocompatible. You can boot to a live linux distro or a partition utility like Gparted and use that to format the drives before you boot windows.

[Dietrick_K]

1 hour ago, njmyers3 said:

If the drives are from 2010 they should be using SATA, so you can just connect that to your PC like a modern drive.

I'm not gonna say that it's impossible for malware on the drives to infect your system, but it's extremely unlikely. Unless you already have malware on your system that could execute it, or you execute it, it has no way of running. Also, malware from 2010 is unlikely to affect a modern operating system, even with Windows Defender as the antivirus.

it is a SATA set up but unsure if it is SATA 3 or 6 which is easy to find with a little google searching. I currently have Norton premium 360 which I think is a good system. my largest fear is just they type of malware was on it since it was one of the PC locking Trojan horses that claimed to be the FBI like garbage. these drives were previously running windows 7 if it has any consequence.

[MarcVez]

I have 2 hitachi drives in my system that have been on almost 24/7 for about 7 years, one has started to drop from raid with smart errors every so often but these drives have been stressed a lot. as for whats on your 2 drives, you could always unplug your OS drive and boot from a windows installer to format them if you're unsure about other bootable options.

[Dietrick_K]

2 hours ago, MarcVez said:

I have 2 hitachi drives in my system that have been on almost 24/7 for about 7 years, one has started to drop from raid with smart errors every so often but these drives have been stressed a lot. as for whats on your 2 drives, you could always unplug your OS drive and boot from a windows installer to format them if you're unsure about other bootable options.

I didn't think about that and I may have to try it. Will take a look in the morning.