Four IDE HDDs - best way to extract their data?

There are four HDDs of the old IDE standard I would like to extract data from. Not even sure if I would keep any of them working later, as a permanent external drive.

Is it the USB - IDE/Sata interface the way to go? The one including an additional power supply for the drive in use.

I know I could go by using my last surviving old PC (Win XP) to connect them one by one to read and transfer the data but I know it is not practical.

Comments / suggestions will be appreciated.

https://www.amazon.com/usb-ide-hard-drive-adapter/s?page=1&rh=i:aps,k:usb to ide hard drive adapter

I have a USB IDE adapter. Plug it in and it is like a thumb drive. Maybe a little slow but fine to find missing files and recover them.

atferrari said:

Is it the USB - IDE/Sata interface the way to go? The one including an additional power supply for the drive in use.

Click to expand...

That's how I do it. I have a few of those laying around. I also sometimes just externally connect a HDD to my wife's Windows 7 box as her system has a few unused SATA ports but if the drive is PATA I just use a USB/IDE interface.

Ron

what i do sometimes is pull an older machine out of the closet, plug in the IDE drive and copy it over the network, or if i have a large enough thumb drive, use dd to copy it to the thumb drive (i use linux, it has some excellent disk management tools) i also have a couple of external USB drive cases with an IDE interface. a good way to archive old disks is dd them to .img files. after making them into disk images, they can be mounted just like .iso files and read or written to

I just hit them with a hammer and throw them in the trash. Old data is not interesting to me.

i have several "generations" of data (all the way back to archives of files that were on my BBS system) that i still find useful from time to time. as i've upgraded over the years i've added much to my "old data" archive. there are things i eventually weed out, such as old DOS and windows programs, but text, documents, pictures, schematics and service manuals i keep. my biggest problem is i've got duplicate copies of hard drive backups, so i need to weed through all of those. my BBS system had 100Mb of files on it, so even if i didn't weed through it, it's not like it takes up a lot of space on a 2 or 3Tb drive. you never know (the official motto of the Packrat's Guild)... when somebody wants to try rebuilding a retro machine like an IBM PC/XT, and they need a DOS driver for their 10base2 ethernet card.