hdd and os

[calleagh]

i have a laptop with win7. i have 2hdd's that i would like to import contents from either directly to laptop (preferable) or to an external hdd. both have winxp. so two questions..............can i do that with two different os and what hardware would i need to facilitate this?

[calleagh]

i almost forgot. the hdd's are both IDE.

[Ddrak]

Google "Hard Drive Dock". Should cost under $20.

Dd

[Freecare Spiritwise]

I haven't looked but I'm guessing you'd be hard pressed to find an IDE dock. I still keep an IDE-to-USB cable for those older drives. You can get it at Newegg for about $20. But all the docks I've seen recently are SATA.

[calleagh]

will this work? http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6812232002

[Freecare Spiritwise]

Perfect.

[Ddrak]

That's a pretty clever little gizmo. I like it!

Dd

[Freecare Spiritwise]

I keep one of those in my laptop bag. It's saved lots of time over the last few years.

[Minute]

Do yourself a favor. Buy a Sata 3 drive & donate these too a school or something. Even my oldest still working PC only has 1 IDE port for DVD drives.

I wonder though, you mention Win XP, does that mean you have them on a PC already? If so, plus in a Cat5E cable or just do it through a Router/Switch & transfer them directly. The data itself is interchangeable.

[Freecare Spiritwise]

None of us will be buying hard drives any time soon. Not unless you want to pay $160 for a 2TB drive that was $60-$80 a couple months ago. The plant that built the drive motors (?) fell into the ocean and up until recently the cheapest 2TB was going for $250! Black Friday 2010 I was getting them for $59.

So the boss said "yeah go ahead and expense whatever drives and docks you need". I finally get a blank check for hard drives and they tripled in price in the week I procrastinated

I am still trying to find a good double-dock with support for both SATA 3 and USB 3, so it's just as well I guess. At that point a drive in the dock runs as fast as an internal drive mounted inside the machine as long as you plug it into a USB 3 system. That's the holy grail of swappable drives for me.

And yeah, having a SATA 3 drive is nice if you have something to plug it into. And that's why even on the road I have one of those little adapter cables with me in my laptop bag. It's nice to tell someone "your problem is that you need a new computer" but ultimately there are shitloads of older systems out there and sometimes people just want the data off an old computer they upgraded.

[Taxious]

JFC, I haven't looked at hard drive prices in a while, that's pretty crazy... I'm glad I bought my TBs when I did last year!

[Freecare Spiritwise]

Yeah, I wouldn't pay that even if it's someone elses' money. At least not anyone I'd be hoping for an XMAS bonus from lol.

My home office network is running around 15TB so I'll make do until hard drives are cheap again. That's not as much storage as it sounds like. The fish grows to fit the size of the tank!

The technology now is great. What used to be a whole office full of computers is now a really powerful one running a bunch of virtual machines and a large file server in the basement. A few years ago we had a big wedding at the house and my mom ended up sleeping on the futon in my office. She said it was like sleeping on the bridge of the starship enterprise lol.

Now anyone walking into my office is only going to see a big tower, a monitor and a sub-woofer as the only identifiable equipment. Thank you cheap multi-core CPUs and (until recently) ultra-cheap storage. Less power, heat and noise too. The last regular office job I had was a big insurance company and you couldn't even talk to someone in the computer room with all noise from the shit with spinning fans. Excessive heat/noise is a pet peeve for my home theater systems too.

...so we'll be waiting a few months for supply to catch up with demand until prices drop to what they were. February maybe?

[Fallakin Kuvari]

Damn Thailand floods, man.

[calleagh]

Do yourself a favor. Buy a Sata 3 drive & donate these too a school or something. Even my oldest still working PC only has 1 IDE port for DVD drives.

I wonder though, you mention Win XP, does that mean you have them on a PC already? If so, plus in a Cat5E cable or just do it through a Router/Switch & transfer them directly. The data itself is interchangeable.

these are old hdd's that i have had for years. my laptop has sata drive but i wish to extract the info off of the old hdd's and import it to the laptop. i have alot of music and pics on them. personally i havent had an ide computer in years.

[Minute]

I was just curious, cause if you could find a PC that had an IDE you could just plug them in there & then transfer the data across a network. As opposed to buying something special for this one use.

[Freecare Spiritwise]

This dock looks good. Too bad it doesn't say if it's SATA 3 or not. It's probably SATA 2. But it sure looks nice, and it's USB 3.

http://www.dealextreme.com/p/2-5-3-5-du ... ack-106957

[Ddrak]

I got a USB3 dock a month ago, and hot damn - never knew how much USB2 was slowing things down.

Dd

[Freecare Spiritwise]

I guess we should all be looking to upgrade our little SATA/IDE --> USB cables to USB 3 too.

@calleagh: Something to consider if you haven't already bought yours. Never hurts to future-proof even if you don't need it now.

[Minute]

I got a USB3 dock a month ago, and hot damn - never knew how much USB2 was slowing things down.

Dd

Yeah, it's dreamy!