Reader Fred wants to know if a laptop hard drive can be plugged into a desktop PC. “The pin out appears to be the same,” he notes, “but there is no separate power-supply connector.” Short answer: yes.

A disk drive can run as either a master device or a slave device. The master drive does not control or take precedence over the slave drive; rather the master drive acts as the primary device; the ...

Most desktop computers have multiple drive bays, each of which can hold a hard drive. If you have a 3.5-inch hard drive and a 3.5-inch drive bay, it will usually slide right in. However, if your drive ...