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As a general rule with computers, the idea of "improving performance" and "old hardware" don't typically go hand-in-hand.

And that's mostly the case with an old hard drive.

Just what can we term as and OLD hard drive, anyways?

From a technicians standpoint, I look at two things. First, the "spindle speed" of the drive. All drives are rated for a certain number of RPMs (rotations per minute). "Old" drives will probably spin at 5400RPM (or 4200RPM in the case of laptop drives) while most new drives spin at least 7200RPM.

Next, I look at the cache size. An older drive probably only has 1 or 2MB of cache. Cache is like RAM for a hard drive, and the more it has (generally speaking) the better the drive is able to perform.

If you're not sure whether or not your drive counts as "old" based on those factors, check the size. If it's anything less than 40GB, it's probably at least "oldish," and won't be able to boost performance in your PC noticeably.

Drives that fall into my old and oldish categories are still useful in a couple of ways. The first is as portable storage. I wouldn't recommend putting critical data on it, though. Drives are all rated with an MTBF - mean (or average) time before failure - so the older a drive is, the closer it is to the maker's rated time to fail. Instead, use it to save things like non-archival photo and document backups, downloaded program installers that you could download again if the drive crashed, and other files like that.

Portable enclosures for drives are cheap, and you can grab one from TigerDirect for about $20. This sabrent model (http://www.tigerdirect.com/ap plications/SearchTools/item-de tails.asp?EdpNo=1734042&CatId= 2779) performs just fine for an inexpensive case.

For the more daring, you can grab a linux distribution like FreeNas (http://www.freenas.org/) and set up a little file server for your home. It's a fun DIY project, and FreeNas doesn't care what size the drives are - if you throw two 8GB, one 10GB, and a 40GB at it, it'll combine them and give you one 66GB networked folder to use.

If it does happen to be larger, then there's definitely at least one performance-enhancing trick you can do with it. By moving your paging file onto this drive, you can help keep your boot drive from becoming overly fragmented.

Get your drive installed and boot Windows, then make sure it shows up under my computer. Now right click on "My Computer" and choose "Properties." Next, click the "Advanced" tab. Now click the "Settings" button, and click

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