I currently use an old hard drive as an external, I bought a conversion kit off ebay and all works fine. I have now taken the hard drive from an unused virgin top box and hoping to use that also as an external hard drive. Both are Seagate 3.5, Virgin one 500GB. I am assuming I would connect it to my PC and reformat. However I am not quite sure of the connections to make as they are slightly different to my current external one, as per image. Any help or advice would be good.
I assume that adapter is a universal USB to IDE/SATA
Your old drive is IDE
Your Virgin drive is SATA
The kit should have a SATA data lead and a SATA power lead and an adapter to convert from a IDE power connector to a SATA power connector.
Looking at your picture the connector on top of the virgin drive looks correct. One lead from that will fit into the top of the large block with the USB lead. The other cable should fit to the power outlet from the power supply.
Although not the same adapter the following Youtube video may give some idea
formatting link
or _some_ of the following
formatting link
Your PC may not see a disk formatted in a Virgin box. A lot of PVRs are formatted as Ext3/Ext4. You may have to install a utility on the PC
formatting link
If formatting fails try the "HP USB disk formatting tool"
formatting link
formatting link
By the way, also useful for reformatting SD cards that have previously been formatted for cameras.
However expect some formatting of large disks to take VERY MANY HOURS perhaps all of overnight!!!! Even smaller sd cards can take hours.
Ok thanks all, I think I have got the connections sussed out now. The spare connections from the initial conversion kit connect to the `virgin` hard drive, I just wasnt sure what went where as it was different to my current external. Hopefully if it is coded to the box I can get that sorted.
It's probably better to invest another quid in a USB 3.0 version:
formatting link
since USB 2.0 is likely to be a bottleneck on most modern drives.
For 3.5" drives you can get adaptors like this:
formatting link
but you're probably better off with a case that also handles power, unless you're willing to fish around the inside of your PC for a spare SATA power connector.
I dunno why he doesnt just mount te damned thing inside his PC and be done with it.
Franly investng time and effort to read an onbsolete drive more than once, to get the data off, is not in my list of cool hip ways to spend my life
External drivees are available at very low prices. If your network is too slow to move data round on it. A Gigabit network is comparable with some USB stuff
Agree with you about faffing around with obsolete stuff, but the *one* argument for having a backup drive not permanently connected is that it saves you from nasty ransomeware that quietly scrambles all your FATs.
I already have a 20GB external hard drive which I just update a few times a year, mostly pictures and a few excel stuff. Purely a back up should my PC fail, it is not permanently connected. This `new` one either goes to the skip or I try and use it as a back-up for the back-up. If I cant get it going then I can do without as most stuff is duplicated on the current external. I lost a lot of stuff a few years back when my PC failed, prevention better than a cure as they say.
Different people have different backup requirements. 20GB does seem absurdly small these days (even I have a 500GB backup drive), but perhaps he doesn't take many photos.
People here and on the parallel thread "OT _ Back up Advice - PC" also talk about generational backups, incremental backups, protecting against a hardware failure while doing the backup, etc. Not everybody needs to be so sophisticated. An offline backup arrangement that will allow you to recover most files after a primary disk crash or ransomware attack is likely to be good enough for ninety per cent of non-business users. Most people don't even have that in place IME.
I must admit the 20GB is getting near capacity. I am quite brutal with pictures and only ever keep the better ones. I did a couple of years back go through them and found loads of similar and badly composed ones, when on hols I probably take around 100 but only keep maybe 20 or so. I have a couple of spreadsheets that are important to me but useless for anyone else but I keep 3 copies stored elsewhere.
Sorry but that's at least twice you've made this misleading statement about ransomware scrambling FATs. It's not the FS metadata that gets scrambled, it's the data stored by targeted file types that gets encrypted with a 1024 bit (or larger) encryption key regardless of the FS type.
For example, all that's needed for a NAS disk volume's contents to be vulnerable to such ransomware, regardless of the FS used by the NAS box, is that it be mapped read/write to a drive letter on an infected MS windows client machine.
Whilst a 20GB drive is laughably small by today's standards (what with the sweet spot price point now around the 6TB mark), only connecting it up to perform backup/restore operations a few times a year is an effective way to minimise the risk of its contents getting encrypted by ransomware. Note the use of the phrase, "minimise the risk". However, assuming reasonable vigilance, it's an effective strategy (a vigilant user would be extremely unlucky to be hit by a ransomware attack just when they'd randomly attached their backup drive for another session but sometimes, "Shit (just) Happens"(tm F.Gump)).
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