It’s completely safe to move your hard drive to a different computer. As long as the interfaces match, you won’t risk damaging your hardware. And barring rare exceptions, your data won’t be affected either.
What happens if I move a hard drive from one computer to another?
Note that hard drives are one of the first parts on a computer to wear out. To move an old drive to a new computer is to risk catastrophic failure and data loss.
Can I connect my hard drive to another computer?
A hard disk drive can be directly connected to any PC via a special USB HDD adapter. These typically come with connections for SATA and IDE/PATA drives and are basically old hard drive adapters.
Can I take a hard drive from one laptop and put it in another?
Will that HDD work on another computer or not? It will work. On first boot, Windows will automatically detect the new hardware and install the correct drivers. However, you will need to re-activate Windows because the hardware swap changes the unique identifier used for online activation.
