by David Pickett

Created on: August 22, 2008

You just replaced your old desktop and are about to throw away the old hard drives or smash them up to stop people getting your data. Stop! Old hard drives may be just that, old hard drives but they can offer a new lease of life to your PC. It sounds odd and it nearly is odd but it works. This guide will tell you why and how to do it.

Firstly, what on earth can I use my old disks for? Well, old hard drives that fit in your PC are perfect for giving over space to certain applications and games. For example say you had a new 500GB Hard Drive and installed on it was Windows and a host of other applications you could use your old hard disk for cache space for Windows. You may know that RAM is where temporary data is written to, well some of your hard disk space is used for this as well. This slows down any open applications and this is particularly true for games where a lot of data needs to go back and forth. Using your old hard disk as the cache may seem like a downgrade but you should be pleasantly surprised with the performance increase.

Secondly, twice as fast. Let's assume your old PC was 2 years old, chances are the Hard Disk is fast enough to allow you to install a game onto it to offer a big performance increase. Just by putting a game onto another Hard Drive it may run twice as fast as Windows can be accessed on one and the current game on the other making your PC very fast, even better if you have 3 drives if you play, for example, FSX. FSX needs to get scenery data for the places you are flying over. Installing another disk can mean that the scenery data can be gathered, the cache can be a seperate place and your Windows installation is somewhere different so the game is not slowed by Windows wanting the Windows Gadget file for your e-mail gadget to refresh for example.

Old hard disks can be very useful and can offer a good performance increase over just using 1 hard disk for everything. It can be hard to fit another hard disk but most computers make this process easy and you can find lots of help online. Don't waste your old hard disks use them for good use and help improve your system performance whilst playing games and working with demanding applications. You can even use your old hard disk as your main storage drive and use a drive,such as the Raptor, for another drive to improve performance. Infact the whole of your old PC can be put to good use if you just do some research.

Learn more about this author, David Pickett.
Click here to send this author comments or questions.