Reading data off an ancient hard drive - will this work?

[Pob255]

That's all good then, it will be just a one off.

I'm surprised they're not fast though. I'd have thought going through SATA would be quicker than USB at least...

It's not the sata that slows them down, they tend to run IDE at only 33.3MB/s or less (IDE did commonly get up to 133MB/s towards the end of it's life)

[mycarsavw]

Out of curiosity: what kind of data are still needed to be rescued on an 18y old drive. If I may ask.

You may, but it's far from interesting

It was accounts data needed to complete an audit on a very lengthy case we inherited when one of our offices was closed.

I knew I had what was required already because I made sure everything was brought forward when I acquired the computer but that wasn't good enough for everyone. Thankfully I'd kept the drive and a backup in my safe.

I built a Win98 VM, popped the data in and away I went

[Bonebreaker777]

You may, but it's far from interesting

Fair enough, I assumed something like that.

It's not the sata that slows them down, they tend to run IDE at only 33.3MB/s or less (IDE did commonly get up to 133MB/s towards the end of it's life)

If I remember correctly, Maxtor was the most prominent manufacturer of drives supporting UDMA 133.

[Pob255]

The interface also has to support the faster speeds and from my experience these cards don't, the desktop ones do, which is a part of there cost.

[Bonebreaker777]

The interface also has to support the faster speeds and from my experience these cards don't, the desktop ones do, which is a part of there cost.

For HDDs with PATA (average sizes were what, 100-200GB) USB 2.0 with 20MB/s real speed should be sufficient for back-up or rescue operations. I think.

[Frankenfurter]

Well that all makes sense. I think.

Whatever the case, I've ordered the cheapo internal one. Hopefully it'll work and maybe even revive my old DVD drive when I'm done.