What you need: Docking station; old hard drive Time required: From 30 minutes to several days
This issue, we’ve been inspired by a letter we received from reader Joe Webber, who discovered some old hard drives while spring cleaning. Realising he had no way to connect them to his PC, he wrote to ask whether we had any suggestions.
As luck would have it, we have several old drives that haven’t been touched for years. In some cases, we’ve lost their cables or power chargers. We could try finding replacements from the original manufacturers, online stores or secondhand websites, but as they’re all different and we don’t know what voltages they require, we’ve opted for another solution: a drive docking station. This will let us connect multiple drives in sequence for occasional use, or leave one or two connected for extended periods if we want to give them a useful second life.
1 Choose a docking station
We’re using the Fideco USB 3.0 Dual Bay HDD Docking Station (£36 from Amazon, , pictured below). The reason we opted for this
