Old IDE Hard Drives

cornemuse

cornemuse

I have this box of old hdds I have been stumbiing over, for a looong time. Decided to do something about it.
I bought a 40 wire ide 'ribbon' connector about 18" long, a male to female one. (ebay, cheap, less than 5 bucks).
Opened an old computer, removed the floppy drive. (it was there just fill the opening!) This mobo has 2 40 pin plugs on it, plugged the (above) into it & fed the other end through the floppie's opening along with a 4 pin molex power cable.
I have a box of ide hdd and floppy data cables, male-male both ends used one to connect to old hdd(s).
Started with the 40 gig hdds. 2 were bad (20 yr old & 21 yr old) one was already empty last had ±15 g data on it. Copied what I wanted to an kinda old (sata) one (comp has 4 sata ports, one to a sata hdd drive tray). Anyways, data transfer is/was faster than using one of those 'ide to sata' adapters, (I have several of those!).

Anyway, this is a viable option/method of getting data transfered.

-corne-
 
I have quite a bit of old IDE disks too (around 10 I suppose). Bought 3 NATEC USB to IDE/SATA2 cases and I use them as extra data storage (mostly backups of backups).
 
40 gigz is not very much these days!
I have one 500g ide & several 320g ide hdds, I will not trash those, 'if they still work'.
 
I bought a IDE to SATA adapter but for some reason it trashed a good SATA HDD. I had to discard the HDD because it no longer worked.

If you bought a long 40-pin Male/Female IDE cable you must have used it to plug in a regular 40-pin IDE cable cable which has 2 or 3 Female connectors. A long 40-pin IDE cable was never recommended because of the potential of data loss and interference. A 18 inch cable was standard with a max of 24 inches for larger cases.

I find a IDE USB enclosure a much safer option. However, if your method works without problems then go for it.

I have 2 x 20 year old computers that used IDE drives. One computer had 2xSATA ports but I never used them. The other computer didn't have any SATA ports so I used a SATA PCI controller card with 2xSATA ports. To install Windows XP on SATA HDDs I had to insert a floppy disk with the appropriate SATA driver during the Windows XP setup. That worked quite well. These SATA controllers only support HDDs so I still have to use IDE CD/ DVD drives. Unfortunately, these are getting hard to find at a reasonable cost.

I used to have several IDE USB enclosures but the last one no longer works reliably. I bought a new IDE/SATA USB enclosure a few months ago for the few IDE drives I have left.

The two computers with Windows XP that are up and running have several other options to get data to and from them:
  • Read/Write HDDs (either IDE or SATA) in external USB enclosures
  • Read/Write CD/DVDs (CDR, CDRW, DVDR, or DVDRW)
  • Read/Write USB flash drives
  • Read/Write across my home network
Note my 2 Windows XP computers can read/write data across my home network from all my other computers which are a mix of Windows 7, 10, and 11.
 
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