I need an enclosure for an 8 year old, 3.5" IDE hard drive. I get disk read errors and can't boot into windows XP, so I need to put it in an enclosure to see where the problem is. I suspect some files are corrupted. Would I be better off getting a IDE/SATA enclosure rather than just an IDE enclosure? Or does it depend on the price? Honestly, I can't find anything I think is good quality based on the user reviews. Maybe I'm being too picky. I've seen a couple that seem ok, but the one is kind of expensive considering I won't be using it that often. Can anyone give me any advice or tell me what to look for? I definitely want to make sure my HD will be compatible with the enclosure. How seriously should I take user reviews?
ohblu, when my Win XP PC died, I bought this acomdata SMBXXXU2E-Blk Aluminum 3.5" Obsidian Black USB 2.0 Samba Enclosure Kit to retrieve all my files from the old drive to a new Win 7 PC. Worked as advertised, at a reasonable price.
-Just this suggestion- It should be possible for you to connect the problematic drive as a slave and use another hard drive as the primary (master) to boot from. If so, this would allow for you to inspect the drive without having to buy an external enclosure. Remember to change the pin setting on the problem drive from master to slave and enable both drives in BIOS.
Buy a good metallic enclosure, it can be useful later. I have used several Vantec NexStar enclosures (for SATA disks) without any problem.
