Question Regarding Hard Drive Enclosures

Hello,
I am looking at a way to turn my spare internal 3.5 inch hard drives into external ones. I had heard an enclosure is one way to do this though I don't know much about them and was looking for some help in knowing what I should look for in an enclosure.

What the device needs to do:

1) Support Both IDE and SATA Internal Hard drives
2) Connect through USB
3) Support Large Capacity Hard Drives (At Least 1 TB)
4) Works with 3.5 inch internal hard drives

Thanks for the help.

I don't know of any one enclosure that supports both IDE and SATA drives - I think you're going to need to buy one of each kind.

Examples:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Prod [...] 6817182143
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Prod [...] 6817810019

You found one? Interesting - do you have a link?

An enclosure literally "encloses" the drive - you screw the drive into it, close it up and you have a neat package that's easy to transport from computer to computer. You generally need a separate enclosure for each drive you have unless you want to spend time with a screwdriver removing and installing drives each time you use them.

A docking station works more like an SD card reader on a much larger scale - it sits on your desk with a slot on the top that you insert a bare hard drive into. You normally leave the docking station attached to the PC and insert whichever drive you want to use at the time. This means you generally only need one docking station no matter how many drives you have.

It's easy to find SATA docking stations because the location of the connections was standardized for all SATA drives. IDE drives can have their connectors in different places, so it's harder to find docking stations for them. I'm tempted to say that there aren't any, but you proved me wrong with your dual IDE/SATA enclosure so I'll hold my tongue...

Interesting - it certainly does sound like it supports both.

All versions of SATA are backward and forward compatible, so you shouldn't have any problems no matter which version of SATA your drive uses.

USB is universally supported these days so if you're using XP or later you really don't need to worry about it.

One of those foam mouse pads would work nicely - there'd be less chance of jarring the drive when you set it down, and you could cut it to the size you need.