Use old laptop's hard drive?

[DoYouKubuntu]

Exactly. After all the problems I had...I'm not EVEN going there!

[SpecialEd]

I purchased the 15" Gazelle in July of 2019. Mine has a 2.5" spinning hy-brid drive and 2 NVME drives.

[Beerislife]

When my old desktop PC died I took out the two 3.5" hard drives (1Tb & 2Tb) and put them in a single USB enclosure. Works fine.

I also replaced the 2.5" 320Gb HDD in my Thinkpad with a 2.5" Crucial 500Gb SSD and bought a cheap USB case for the original HDD to use for file transfer. Again, works fine.

[jglen490]

Ha ha, I hear you, @oshunluvr! Waterproof and drop-resistant, too. Always good to have.

Hey guys, I've just found this enclosure, by narrowing down my search criteria to 4+ stars. It looks good to me; what do you think? Guess what? Its compatibility list includes Linux!!

Yep, I have 4 of those Ugreen enclosures, and they are really good. I've bought cheaper ones from Ebay and Amazon before, but they never lasted long and the controller has typically started showing instability after just a few (15 -20) uses as a data backup solution. Each one has a spinner, so undoubtedly a bit slower on write, but are economical to replace.

I had three spinners that seemed to have died after use in the old enclosures, but after working on them, they all (except one) again became useful and are used in my backup rotation.

[GreyGeek]

I bought my Acer in 2012 and it wasn't until three years later when I took the back off to upgrade the RAM from 8GB to 16GB that I saw an empty bay!
Later I created an empty bay by replacing my CDROM with an HDCADDY, which gave me three bays.

[DoYouKubuntu]

It's supposed to come today. Then I need to get my tired old eyes focused long enough to muck about with the itsy-bitsy screws in the old laptop, and take its drive out. From there it should be smooth sailing...right?

It's good to hear some personal experience with this brand. Thanks for that, @jglen490.

The way I feel right now is that if this enclosure doesn't last ten years (like I expect everything to!), well, I only paid 23 cents for it, so it'll all be good.

@SpecialEd, I'm curious about your Gazelle. Did you see my configuration? According to that, I don't have any additional bays.

@Beerislife, yeah, I've done the same with old hard drives from desktops, but never laptops. I've replaced laptops' drives before, but not used an old one on a different machine externally.

I've even opened up a dying DirecTV DVR and taken out its hard drive, in hopes of being able to use it with a computer to view my recorded shows. Alas, that did not work.

Wish me luck! The way things were going there for awhile, I may need it. Nah, I think it'll be fine.

GG, we were posting at the same time. So do you guys think there's actually an empty bay in my new laptop?

[SpecialEd]

You're right, @claydoh, it's a Gazelle 17.3". And I just went back to look at its specs--that's how I knew for sure it does not have an empty bay. At least that's what it says for mine:

WiFi 6 + Bluetooth
Ubuntu 20.04 LTS (64-bit)
4 GB GDDR5 GTX 1650 w/ 896 CUDA Cores
17.3" Matte Full HD 1080p (120 Hz) $69
5 GHz i7-10750H (2.6 up to 5 GHz - 12MB Cache - 6 Cores - 12 Threads)
8 GB DDR4 at 2933 MHz (1× 8GB)
500 GB NVMe Seq Read: 2100 MB/s, Seq Write: 1500 MB/s $45
No Additional M.2 NVMe
No Additional 2.5" Drive
1 Year Limited Parts and Labor Warranty
Normal Assembly Service

I believe that's telling you what you have, not what's available.

[DoYouKubuntu]

I believe that's telling you what you have, not what's available.

Um...I know? That's what my point was. That's a list of my actual configuration, with *no* additional...drives...I was thinking BAYS. Oh well. Oops!

[DoYouKubuntu]

Just thinking out loud here, but down the road a bit, I think I'm going to get a System76 Meerkat, tall, with one 1TB drive. Then, I'll copy all the data I want from the hard drive in this OP to the Meerkat's drive, wipe the old drive, and stick it in the Meerkat's other slot. That'll give me two, 1TB hard drives. I already have extra Logitech Trackman trackballs, a monitor, and keyboards, so I'll be all set to go.

What prompted this is my desire to finally retire my two remaining desktops. One--don't laugh--is running 6.something...I can't remember. I haven't booted it up in a really long time. The other is running 9.10 (or maybe 9.04), but it's almost 15 years old and I just think it's time to put it to bed. I occasionally pull files from it or look at something (over my network, never in person), but anything that was really important was long ago backed up with my other important stuff.

When the time comes, it'll be nice to clear my computer desk of all its STUFF! Two towers, two keyboards, one monitor (I was using an A/B switch at one point), two trackballs. Gone. Poof! I'll like that. Maybe I'll seize the opportunity to, um, discard my Zip disks, too...

[GreyGeek]

Don't know if you have a 2nd bay or not in your System 76, but a quick popoff off the bottom cover will tell the tale.

I priced out my ideal Meerkat setup. Only a cool $4,661 buckaroos.
Not much of a chance I'd ever come into possession of that beast!

[DoYouKubuntu]

Don't know if you have a 2nd bay or not in your System 76, but a quick popoff off the bottom cover will tell the tale.

Yeah...NO!!! GG, with all due respect, there's no way in hell I'm tinkering with this laptop's innards. Not now. Not so soon after the myriad of problems I had. I'm convinced that I'll screw it up somehow! No...

I priced out my ideal Meerkat setup. Only a cool $4,661 buckaroos.
Not much of a chance I'd ever come into possession of that beast!

Whoa! Really? A Meerkat? I glanced at their servers--and quickly left. They started in the thousands. But my Meerkat is doable at <$900. Note that I don't need many frills/extras. It will be used purely as a file server/storage over my network...No way on earth I'd pay $4,500+ for it!

I'm still agonizing over the $1,500 I spent on this laptop. I've had a lot of big expenses lately, and buying a new laptop was definitely not anywhere in my plans, but, you know, life happens! What are you going to do?

KFN QUESTION: Why do my paragraphs get broken into weird chunks when I post? See the one above, starting with "Whoa!"? The only way I could get the last sentence to stay with it was by adding characters to join them, hence the ... between "network" and "No way"

[Beerislife]

My Lenovo Chromebook Duet has 128Gb of internal storage so I'm thinking of getting a 500Gb M.2 2280 NVMe drive plus case to beef it up. But seeing as I only get out of the house maybe once a week lately it hardly seems worth it..

https://bre.is/EXySK8RC

[DoYouKubuntu]

Alrighty, guys and gals, the enclosure is in my hot little hands...

...but I'm not tackling it until tomorrow.

Is there anything in particular I should do or be aware of prior to tackling this? I mean aside from the obvious, like unplug the laptop before I start mucking about with its innards. Just power it down, take the drive out, stick it in the enclosure, plug it in to the appropriate port on the new laptop, and...that's it, right? Please let that be it. If this ends up losing the data on that hard drive, I'll be unhappy, but it won't be a catastrophe. I believe in backups!

[jlittle]

Is there anything in particular I should do or be aware of prior to tackling this?

In theory, USB 2 does not deliver enough power to start up a hard drive. I had a USB to SATA adapter (not an enclosure) that said, don't use with hard drives, just SSDs, for this reason. At one point laptops came with a mix of USB 2 and 3 (I have one at work) but I can't remember what you've told us about yours.

[DoYouKubuntu]

In theory, USB 2 does not deliver enough power to start up a hard drive. I had a USB to SATA adapter (not an enclosure) that said, don't use with hard drives, just SSDs, for this reason. At one point laptops came with a mix of USB 2 and 3 (I have one at work) but I can't remember what you've told us about yours.

Yes, it has a mix, with four total USB ports. This enclosure is type A; the laptop has two type A ports. From its specs: "USB 3.0 (USB 3.1 Gen 1) Port Type A" and "USB 3.1 Gen 2 (Type A) Port" The enclosure's info is here. I think I should be okay.