New life for old hard disks

Recently I decided to breathe new life into this old Dell laptop by installing Linux on it.

But first it needed a bigger hard drive, so one was duly installed. Problem: what to do with the old drive, which is a perfectly good 10Gb IBM unit? Answer: my friend Quentin brought me back a cute little Firewire drive enclosure from the US. It clicks open to reveal a little motherboard and a slot for the drive.

Slide the drive in, snap the case shut, slip on the rubberised shock protector and — Hey Presto! — you have a neat little Firewire drive.

Not quite an iPod, but not bad either!