Can I turn these 2 external hard drives into internal ones?

thegameksk

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Hey all. I currently have a laptop. I am building my own desktop that I want to move the external hard drives into. The 2 drives are a Samsung Story 1.36 TB and WD My Book 3.63 TB. If they can be out into my new build, what wires do I need to connect them if any? Thanks.
 

Emanuel Elmo

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Mar 21, 2014
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From what I remember.

First if you have any data on them back that data up.
open up the cases for those external drives and just take out the HDD.
Place the HDD in your case as you would any HDD
Boot up the computer and have windows detect them.

From here it can go two ways
First way:
windows see them assigned a drive letter to them and you can access them fine.

second way:
If windows does not do the first way, you would need to go into device manager
than format the drives for them to come up
than move your data that you backed up to your drives on your computer.
 

thegameksk

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Thank you. Is there anyway to know if my HDis failing? The Samsung is about 6 years old now but it seems to be okay but im kinda concerned since its old. I am planning on moving my current SSD thats in my laptop to the new computer. Do I have to worry about reformatting it as well?
 

Emanuel Elmo

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If you are going to move your SSD to your computer yes you would need to format it and install windows.

Your current SSD will have drivers and programs that will not work well with your new computer. So it is needed to do a format and a re-install of windows.

If your HDD is still going well after 6 years, I don't think you will have a problem.

But as I have said, if you back up your data that is on your external drives, even if it fails when you put it in your new computer, you will still be ok because you would not have lost any of your data, cause it is backed up.
 

thegameksk

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Ah. So if I keep the external as it is will it still need to be formatted? I am currently running windows 8.1. I am eligable for an upgrade to win 10. The windows cd I currently have is from my old computer (one im currently on). Im trying to figure out how to get windows 10 onto my new computer without having to buy a whole new windows. Is there a way to do this? Sorry if its a newb question.
 

Emanuel Elmo

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if you keep the externals as they are, there would be no need to format them.

Is there a way to move your SSD from your laptop to your new computer. Anything can be done. Will it work... sure it might work but you most likely will have compatibility issues.

Chipset driver will not be same form laptop to your new motherboard
pre-build programs that came with your laptop may cause stability issues with your new computer (IE when you start it in your new computer for the first time you might get a lot of error messages, run time errors, etc) That you may be able to get rid of but will take alot of time and possibly some editing in your windows registry.

At the end of the day, it can be done, but it is not advisable to just move an SSD from an old computer to a new one that is being built.

Always when building a new computer it is recommended that you start with a clean SSD or HDD and do a clean install of windows.
 

Emanuel Elmo

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there are many ways of going about and doing a clean install of windows.

When you guy and buy windows 10, it no longer comes on a DVD. It actually comes on a USB Drive

Here is a great guide on how you can do it.
http://www.overclock.net/t/1240779/seans-windows-8-install-optimization-guide-for-ssds-hdds

It does say that it is for windows 8 but the steps would be the exact same for windows 10

:)