Best 3.5″ HDD cases for your internal Hard Drive

A hard drive enclosure is a basic piece of kit which can transform a standard internal hard drive into an external hard drive, or even better a speed SSD solid-state drive in almost just a few seconds. If a computer dies for any reason other than a dead hard drive, you can always convert the old drive into an external unit, and grab important files off the drive in the process. The same thing can be done if you install a larger hard drive in your computer and don’t know what to do with the old one.

You have to determine what kind of drive you have because you need a 3.5″ HDD case that is compatible with your drive. Older computers contain PATA or IDE hard drives, and newer ones contain SATA hard drives. The connectors on PATA hard drives consist of a double row of metal pins, while the connectors on SATA hard drives consist of two flat tabs.

Installing a hard drive in an external enclosure is very easy; usually, all you need is a screwdriver. In the worst case, you might have to move or remove a jumper that sets the drive to be a master or slave, but the odds are you won’t have to touch anything but your screwdriver. Once your external drive is working, you can connect it to a computer and pull any files you want from it. Then you can format the drive and start with a clean slate.