Over the last week or so, we’ve talked about the flooding situation in Thailand and how it will likely result in a widespread shortage of platter-based drives. In the wake of all this, a question has arisen: if you’re running out of room, what does one do instead of trying to purchase a possibly non-existent hard drive or deleting files? After all, you need to store your files somehow.

Yes, this shortage is certainly inconvenient, but it helps if you look at it like this: it’s not about what you can’t get; it’s about making the most of what you already have.

Fortunately, a solution may be sitting in your basement, that bottom desk drawer or the old storage unit. If you’ve been a computer user for more than a few years, there’s a good chance that you have an older hard drive or two laying around unused. Sure, they’re not the multi-terabyte, super-fast drives that we’ve been seeing recently, but in a pinch, 80GB is 80GB.

Connecting the Drives

The trick is, of course, mounting those drives on your desktop, so you can transfer files over to them. Fortunately, OWC has a number of different options for using those older drives externally with your current system. Let’s take a look at the different options. Article Continues…