Recycling Your Old Hard Drive - 4 Easy Steps

When you're upgrading your computer, it's common to want to keep your old hard drive. It's not uncommon for someone to wind up with multiple hard drives they're not using. Before you recycle them, though, there are a few things you should do first. We've compiled four easy steps that will help ensure that personal information is properly purged from the device before it ends up in the wrong hands.

Check your hard drive to see if you can still use it.

Computers and other electronics will start to slow down as they get older. If your computer is more than 5 years old, it’s probably not as fast as it used to be and may even be causing other problems. When A New Hard Drive Installs While your hard drive won’t affect performance too much, it may take a few moments for your computer to boot up if you have a less-than-ideal hard drive. They also won’t function properly if the hard drive you install isn’t completely new. Determine the maximum capacity of the hard drive you plan to install. Most disks sold today are rated at at least 15 years — or 20 for the extreme enthusiasts — the minimum expected lifespan for drives produced before today. You can get this information from your computer manufacturer: Kingston Technology, and Main gear all sell drives that are at least 10 years old. It’s recommended that you purchase a brand new drive if it’s more than 10 years old so there’s plenty of life left in the hard drive. If you have a 20 or older hard drive, there will be issues if you remove it. If you intend to remove your old hard drive, know that there are better options available. Upgrading to a SSD will improve your hard drive’s performance and reduce the amount of time it takes to boot up your computer. You can find SSDs in most stores that sell computers. One great benefit of going SSD is that it means you won’t need as much space on the hard drive as you have been using. Which Part of the Hard Drive to Replace? When you upgrade your drive or part of it, you’ll want to use a specific drive part to ensure nothing catastrophic happens to the hard drive. While older drives tend to do fine, they’re prone to failure. For Dell, the drives are installed with a 5.5-inch short drive and a 3.5-inch long drive.

Back up your files before recycling the hard drive.
Back up your files before recycling your hard drive. If you are disposing of your old computer, make sure you back up all your files. If your computer is running slow and you're thinking about getting a new one, remember that the old one can be reused or recycled if you're willing to take the time to back up and erase your old data. Having a backup in your backup is always a good idea.

Remove sensitive information from the hard drive before recycling it
If you’re getting rid of an old hard drive, make sure you remove all sensitive information from it before you recycle it or give it away. There are a few easy ways to do this. First, you can simply remove the hard drive from the computer and plug it directly into another computer. Assuming you don’t want to burn the data to a blank CD-ROM, there are a few tools that can read the data off of a hard drive without physically opening it up. USB Live can read off of hard drives up to 500 gigabytes in size. Analysis Services for Mac has a free utility that can read 500 gigs of data directly from a hard drive. Note: these tools all literally open up the hard drive, which we highly recommend against. And you can’t throw a CD-ROM into Analysis Services for Mac; you'll have to use Terminal to access the data. Here’s what you need to do to give your 2007 MacBook Pro a clean slate before you recycle it. Step 1: Delete all sensitive data Remove all data that you don’t need to be easily accessible. Software programs, emails, passwords, and anything else that is clearly off limits should be burned to a blank CD-ROM, tossed in the trash, or destroyed. Don’t store anything on a compromised hard drive that you aren’t willing to lose. I would highly recommend you wipe your drive prior to salvaging it.
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