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Dell Inspiron + External Hard Drive


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Hello My trusty Packard Bell gave up the ghost 2 months ago and the Pc Docs told me the mother board had burnt out but the hard drive (80GB) was ok and he saved my docs to a flash drive and I bought a new Inspiron 660S with

Intel dual core i3-2120. Processor speed 3.3GHz. 4GB DDR3 RAM. Hard drive: 1000GB SATA hard drive.

I know the old hard drive wouldn't fit into the new Dell as the new pc is a compact size but how would it be possible to connect the old hard drive to the new Dell? is it possible to be able to use it for backing up files etc even if it has to 'live outside' sort of thing? Thanks for any advice.

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Chronos the 2nd

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There is no reason why the old (very old) 80 Gb hard-drive should not fit in the new PC as hard-drive are pretty much a standard size for a desktop: 3.5" and 2.5"for a laptop. We now have 2.5"SSD hard-drives but I wwould worry about them.

I suspect that your 80Gb hard- drive has an IDE connection and your new PC will have Sata which would mean connecting to the new PC a little tricky.

So I suggest getting an external hard-drive caddy which will take IDE and Sata. Something like this. Caddy. It will be just a case of undoing a couple of screws sliding your HDD in connecting power and data cable to it, putting the face plate back on then plugging it into your PC with the supplied USB cable.It should be automatically seen by Windows and hopefully you will be good to go.

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If it's the Inspirion 660s I don't think there is a spare bay to fit another internal hard drive. It does have two sata ports on the motherboard though not sure where Optical Drive plugs in.

You could get a usb caddy and put the old hard drive in that, then it will be a usb external hard drive.

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