- Mar 1, 2008
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I've quite a few old machines sitting round various parts of North America. Being old, they almost all contain IDE / PATA hard drives, ranging in capacity from 2 GB to 650. I should like to transfer most of this data from the IDE drives to my contemporary SATA drives (I've been amassing TB drives to this end... and a 1.5 TB Seagate I don't quite trust for the job, heh).
What would be the most efficient, least aggravating method for harvesting the data from my disparate IDE drives? I'd originally been moving files gradually over a LAN to my storage servers, but this is taking rather a long time, and many of the drives are 'orphaned' and have to be swapped back inside these old machines. I wonder if it might be better to
- Get a drive 'rack' into which I would place all my IDE drives by swapping them into the drive tray. Installing and uninstalling drives from a tray seems less painful than continually swapping them into internal drive bays. Transfer data directly to SATA drives in the same machine.
- Buy an external enclosure (USB 2.0 or FireWire) into which I'd swap the IDE drives as above.
I've zero experience with external enclosures and have read some reviews suggesting it's a pain in the arse to get drives inside some of them.
Also if I simply connected a 'naked' drive through a dock or even an IDE ribbon running into a semi-opened case, would I be asking for data corruption from EM issues?
What would be the most efficient, least aggravating method for harvesting the data from my disparate IDE drives? I'd originally been moving files gradually over a LAN to my storage servers, but this is taking rather a long time, and many of the drives are 'orphaned' and have to be swapped back inside these old machines. I wonder if it might be better to
- Get a drive 'rack' into which I would place all my IDE drives by swapping them into the drive tray. Installing and uninstalling drives from a tray seems less painful than continually swapping them into internal drive bays. Transfer data directly to SATA drives in the same machine.
- Buy an external enclosure (USB 2.0 or FireWire) into which I'd swap the IDE drives as above.
I've zero experience with external enclosures and have read some reviews suggesting it's a pain in the arse to get drives inside some of them.
Also if I simply connected a 'naked' drive through a dock or even an IDE ribbon running into a semi-opened case, would I be asking for data corruption from EM issues?