Removing disk from Iomega 3.5 external

donjeezy

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May 1, 2011
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I have an Iomega 250gb USB 2.0 external hard drive that I've been using with my laptop. Now the laptop is dead, and I would like to remove the disk from its enclosure to use in the desktop system I'm building. I want to preserve the data on the drive.

I opened the enclosure and inside there's a circuit board attached directly to the disk by some metal rails:
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Is it safe to remove this extra circuit board and rails? The drive is labeled as SATA, so will I be able to use it in my system like normal?

It's been a while since I examined a hard drive, so I'm not even sure if the bigger circuit board mounted under the drive is supposed to be there.

Another weird thing: this is a 250GB hard drive. That's what I bought, and it shows up as 250GB in Windows. But the label on the disk says 500GB! Is it possible that the attached circuit is restricting the drive down to 250GB?
 
The circuit board is for the interface; on one side the drive is attached, and on the other side the connectors (USB) plugs in. You need to detach the HDD from this interface board. Depending on the design, you may also need some type of adapter to attach the drive to the HDD bay in the computer case. If the adaptation is not simple, leave the drive alone and continue to use it as an external drive.

The label that says 500 GB means that the circuit board is capable of accepting HDDs up to 500 GB.
 

donjeezy

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May 1, 2011
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Thanks for the reply! I am still confused though. The 500 GB is on the Seagate label on the hard disk itself. It seems weird that it would refer to the interface board.
 

Oh! I thought that the label was on the interface board.

Install and run 'Belarc Advisor' - it will identify all your hardware as well as your software. Now check what it says about the hard disk. If it still says 250 GB, that means that the label on the hard disk is wrong. Maybe that's why it was used in an external enclosure rather than scrap it.