hello.. I vave an old laptop harddrive with a bunch of my old data on it and I was wondering if there was a cable I could build to connect it to my latop to transfer data... kinda like an external harddrive ... thanks again

 

Just buy a cheap hd enclosure.

That is what I did when I upgraded my ibook g3. I took out the 20 GB hd from the ibook, put it into cheap enclosure. I replaced the 20 GB hd with 120 GB hd in the ibook. So now I have 20 GB external hd and 120 GB internal hd.

One advice that I followed at the time is that I got enclosure with a cable that has two usb connectors that go into the laptop, this way the external hd gets power from two usb ports.

 

+1 All you have to look out for is that the enclosure you buy has the right interface for the drive in your old laptop. The enclosure should be under $10 USD if you hunt around.

You didn't mention the make of the old laptop. Macs can be booted into Target Disk Mode which allows direct access to the hard drive over a firewire cable. Easy peasy. There are firewire networking tools for PCs, but it's probably easier to just get the enclosure than to horse around with networking.

 

They make adapters too.. ..hard drive connector to usb.
like this
http://www.cooldrives.com/index.php...tml?fee=1&fep=481&utm_source=merchantcntr2014

 

They make adapters too.. ..hard drive connector to usb.
like this
http://www.cooldrives.com/index.php...tml?fee=1&fep=481&utm_source=merchantcntr2014

Enclosure is much cheaper. Newegg has them starting at 6 dollars. In some cases the shipping will be more than the product being shipped.

 

Here's one similar to what I got for a friend not long ago.

 

Here's one similar to what I got for a friend not long ago.

I have one like that. Two notes about it:
* the little screws that hold the pcb to the case are kinda weak
* I don't like the usb cable that is shown at that ebay offer, I think the best is to get usb cable that has 3 usb connectors (2 plug into laptop/computer, 1 plug into enclosure). This way hd draws power from two usb ports. When I was shopping for my enclosure I read that if you power hd from one usb port, you often do not provide enough power to hd and hd breaks sooner.

 

Here is mine:

 

sorry it took so long to reply,, been very busy with work.. the hdd is out of my old dell, my wife has all of her photos on it and a lot of my data is on it.. I was hoping for some diy ideas to build it myself.. but I was also unaware that enclosures were available to do this

 

It's not really a DIY project -- you need specialized controller electronics to "translate" SATA or IDE to USB; these generally don't come in small quantities, and are not home-soldering-iron-friendly.

Even if you could get all the parts and a schematic to put it together, you'd likely spend 3x-4x than you would on an enclosure.

 

It's not really a DIY project -- you need specialized controller electronics to "translate" SATA or IDE to USB; these generally don't come in small quantities, and are not home-soldering-iron-friendly.

Even if you could get all the parts and a schematic to put it together, you'd likely spend 3x-4x than you would on an enclosure.

yea ill probably just buy one.. the local computer shop wants 25 bucks a gig to transfer and ive got over 30 gigs of data.. I think a 20 dollar part isa better idea.. I also seen a 1tb laptop hdd on ebey cheap,, I could slave that bastard to my laptop now and have mad storage