Need to transfer lots of data from old internal drives to new external drive.
December 4, 2007 12:04 AM   Subscribe

I have two IDE hard drives in my closet, and I need to get the info on them into a new external drive. What's the best way to do this?

Upon selling my old Mac G4/400 desktop in 05/2006, I took the hard drives out and put them in static-proof bags. These drives have about 200gb worth of mp3s and 250gb worth of movies on them. My ideal world would involve an external ESATA (SATAII) drive connected to my new MacBook Pro via ExpressCard that would house all of this old info.

To recap: two IDE drives -> one ESATA drive (intended for right now to be a 750gb Seagate FreeAgent) via ExpressCard

Is there any easier way than to find someone with a desktop tower that has spare bays open and the internal hardware available to xfer this data? My other option I guess would be to house the two existing drives in an external fw800 enclosure and xfer the data through my laptop to the new drive.

Are there any better options? Thanks!
posted by arnicae to Computers & Internet (4 answers total) 3 users marked this as a favorite
 
Best answer: Why not buy the external ESATA drive, then buy a IDE to USB cable, and plug the old IDE drive, one at a time to the Macbook Pro, and transfer it straight to the ESATA drive?
posted by jaimev at 12:11 AM on December 4, 2007


jaimev is spot on.
posted by limon at 12:39 AM on December 4, 2007


@jaimev's advice is good. An alternative is to buy an inexpensive USB enclosure. Then you could reuse one of the olds disks (say, for backup) once you've pulled the bits you want off.
posted by dws at 7:36 AM on December 4, 2007


Great Q&A -- I just picked up a IDE - USB adapter. I've got a pile of old drives that likely have good data on them.
posted by indigo4963 at 8:20 AM on December 4, 2007


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