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How-To: Reclaim your Mac’s old hard drive or build a new one with an external USB enclosure

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Earlier this year, I wrote several guides to boost the speeds of older Macs by swapping their internal hard drives for super-fast solid state drives (SSDs). As readers have confirmed, their older iMacs, MacBooks, and Mac Pros have seen dramatic improvements with new SSDs. But some people were left with a question: what should I do with my Mac’s old hard drive? Throw it away?

A great answer: put it in an external hard drive enclosure and keep using it! My latest How-To shows you how easy it is to reclaim your Mac’s old drive by installing it in a nice USB enclosure such as Akitio’s SK-3501U3 (shown here), which I chose because of its Mac-matching design, reasonable sub-$40 price, and compatibility. External enclosures are also ideal options if you want to choose a high-quality hard drive mechanism for yourself, rather than taking a risk on whatever might be hidden inside a fully-assembled external drive. I’ll explain that, and much more, below…

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Photo credit Eric Gaba, Wikimedia Commons user Sting

A Quick Primer On Internal Hard Drives

The vast majority of Macs in homes have mechanical hard drives (rather than chip-based SSDs) inside. Without a computer or another enclosure surrounding them, these hard drives are called “internal hard drives.” They’re small metal boxes akin to old-fashioned record players, with one or more spinning disks (“platters”) that get accessed by a “read/write head” (shown above). Hard drives aren’t all created equal, and they aren’t built to last forever: good drives typically last for around three years of very active use, and great ones for five years. Light use extends their lives.

With over 27,000 drives on hand, Backblaze last year published the most comprehensive independent test results I’ve seen for consumer-grade hard drives. Comparing Seagate, Hitachi GST, and Western Digital disks of various capacities, Backblaze found that Hitachi GST’s drives had the lowest failure rate at any capacity, followed closely by Western Digital, with Seagate ranking a very distant third. “If the price were right,” Backblaze said, “we would be buying nothing but Hitachi drives.”

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But nothing’s set in stone: Western Digital now owns Hitachi GST, and Seagate has been working to improve the reliability of its drives. This year, Backblaze updated its findings with new failure statistics, noting that it now has over 41,000 drives in use. It found that Seagate’s latest 4TB drives are much better than ones it previously tested — still about twice as failure-prone than Hitachi GST drives, but not 20 times worse (like Seagate’s 3TB drives). Western Digital and Hitachi GST drives otherwise remained excellent.

In short, if you’re pulling a hard drive out of a three- to five-year-old Mac that’s been left powered on for most of its life, you might be better off disposing of it rather than continuing to use it until it fails. But a $40 external enclosure can keep your old drive going as a “just in case” backup, or let you choose the specific brand new internal drive you want from a great manufacturer. Why would you do that? Because if you’re thinking of buying a fully-assembled external drive, you may not know who makes the drive mechanism inside, which can be risky. Here are links to Seagate’s, Hitachi GST’s, and Western Digital’s internal drives, all of which are available in multiple capacities and price points. Just remember, the statistics demonstrate conclusively that cheaper isn’t necessarily better here.

Understanding External Enclosures

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When you buy any fully-assembled external hard drive for your Mac, you’re really buying two things: an internal hard drive like the ones shown above, and an external enclosure. To keep costs low, the cheapest external enclosures ($15-$20) often cut corners by using bare-bones chips, cables, and materials. They also may not include power supplies, which means they’re fully dependent on your Mac for power. Buyers consequently sometimes complain about random disconnections, refusals to mount, a lack of Mac compatibility, or other problems.

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The Akitio SK-3501U3 enclosure shown here is a very good option for the $35 price. It includes a USB 3.0 cable, a wall power supply, and the screws necessary to mount any 3.5″ hard disk inside. Akitio also sells a 2.5″ enclosure that’s physically smaller and designed solely for laptop drives. (If you instead want to use the SK-3501U3 with an adapter for a smaller 2.5″ laptop drive, the Newer Technology AdaptaDrive Converter is the one I recommend. It’s not needed for 3.5″ drives.)

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Akitio’s enclosure is made from thick, solid-feeling aluminum that looks great next to a Mac. As you can see above, it’s a little smaller than the superb G-Tech G-Drive USB I’ve previously reviewed and loved, and its blue data indicator light is off to the back rather than glowing through the mesh front. The light only goes on when it’s connected to a computer and in use. There’s also a bottom-mounted heat sink to keep temperatures down, a design element found on older and larger G-Drives.

Full assembly requires around 15 minutes, one type 0 or sharp type 1 Philips head screwdriver, and zero prior experience. First, four small (and easy to misplace) screws get removed from the enclosure’s bottom, enabling you to slide the hard drive tray out from its center. You flip the tray over, attach four slightly larger screws to the tray and your hard drive, then slide the tray back into the enclosure. After replacing the four bottom screws, you apply four frosted clear rubber feet on top of them. That’s it.

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The result is a completely functioning hard drive that’s plenty fast, with modern USB 3.0 connectivity that’s backwards compatible with USB 2.0 computers. Though speeds will vary based on the speed of the internal hard drive you place inside, the Akitio enclosure achieved Blackmagic Disk Speed Test results of 125-127MB/second when my old iMac’s four-year-old Western Digital drive was inside, and a USB 3.0 Mac was connected. That’s nearly as fast as the best speeds I’ve seen with the brand new G-Drive USB I purchased last December.

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If your old hard drive will only be needed temporarily, you can consider an external hard drive docking station instead. Unlike enclosures, which are designed to completely cover, protect, and in many cases muffle the sound of the hard drive inside, a docking station such as the $40 Sabrent USB 3.0 dual-dock (shown below) or $23 single dock version can be used briefly to plug in 2.5″ or 3.5″ drives like pieces of bread in a toaster. There are no screws to mess with here; these are completely plug and play solutions. While I wouldn’t recommend them for extended use due to dust and noise considerations, docking stations can be viable alternatives for one-off access to drives you won’t keep using for long periods of time.

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On the “easy to difficult” scale, putting your old internal hard drive into either an external hard drive enclosure or docking station is ultra-easy — almost certainly simpler than removing the drive from your Mac. It’s also extremely cost-effective, and there are many times when I’ve benefitted from having an external enclosure around to deal with an older, misbehaving hard drive. Having a 3.5″-sized enclosure with the option of using a 2.5″ adapter strikes me as the right combination for Mac owners with both desktop and laptop hard drives, but laptop owners with 2.5″ drives will be fine with smaller enclosures, and docking stations may work for some people. You can choose the solution that’s best for your personal needs.

Even More Great Options

Read more of my How-To guides and reviews for 9to5Mac here (and don’t forget to click on Older Posts at the bottom of the page to see everything)!

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Comments

  1. We pulled a hard drive out of an old Macbook Pro and enclosed it. We connected to our iMac as a backup. The iMac won’t start without the drive attached now and has a flashing “?” folder if it doesn’t. I heard it’s because it forgot where the boot drive is so we tried selecting the boot drive but apparently the old Macbook is the only one because the internal HD got renamed. How do I fix it?

    • Jeremy Horwitz - 9 years ago

      Super, super weird. If you’ve already tried the obvious route (System Preferences > Startup Disk, select the correct hard drive and restart), you can try running Disk Utility (built into your Mac) to see if your internal drive needs to be repaired. The next step would be to disconnect the MacBook Pro drive from your iMac and use this guide from Apple for Internet-based OS X Recovery: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201314

      • It doesn’t give me that option and OS X recovery is unavailable as it is a 2007 iMac running Snow Leopard. Is it possible to upgrade?

    • Lantz Newberry - 7 years ago

      If you hold down the Option key when starting up it will open a window that reveals all drives that have a bootable OS. It’s a handy way to check issues and choose which drive to boot up in. If the drive is not bootable it won’t show up. Just boot up in a drive that does and do your troubleshooting from there.

  2. Juster Tester - 9 years ago

    If I were to upgrade my iMac with an SSD, I could still leave my existing hard drive in the imac for standard file storage?

    • Jeremy Horwitz - 9 years ago

      Depends on the iMac and how comfortable you are with modification. It’s relatively easy to pull a hard drive or optical drive out and put an SSD in. Unless you are OK losing your optical drive, I personally recommend hard drive replacement, and it’s what I did myself. More challenging is nesting an SSD behind the logic board on some iMacs, which lets you leave the hard drive intact.

      • Juster Tester - 9 years ago

        So if my iMac is EMC 2429, would it work? How would I know which iMac is compatible or will work?

  3. patstar5 - 9 years ago

    I have a mid 2010 macbook pro and would like to change the hard drive out. I’ve seen some fusion hard drives on amazon, right now I have a 250gb one that came with it and my photo library is on an external ssd.
    What’s a good hard drive around 1tb (or more)?

  4. heymuzzwatchadoin - 9 years ago

    The average IQ of you 9to5ers is definitely in the 80s.

  5. Sam Hayden - 9 years ago

    I have an old G4 Cube that doesn’t start up anymore but I would really like to transfer the contents of the hard drive – what method would you suggest? Thank you!

  6. Cherry Sewell - 8 years ago

    I am upgrading to a Macbook pro from my old white Macbook. I have a fairly new HD in the old Macbook (1TB) which I thought to pull out, enclose and use as my external back up HD. I have everything from that HD backed up to an existing external Western Digital 500GB hard drive, so I don’t need the info on the 1TB HD. Is this advisable? Or should I just buy another new external HD to use with my new Macbook Pro and keep the old Macbook whole as a back up. I have very little data to be honest, so I don’t even need the 500GB to hold everything and have loads of space. I’m not technical at all… so I would have to have someone do this for me so you don’t need to go into any technical explanations as to how to do it :) Thanks!