Most of us upgrade our PC in every 2 to 3 years… When we do so we find we may have few extra full functional left over product from the old PC… One of which could be a PATA / IDE (U-ATA) Hard Disk drive…

Now days all new motherboard may come with only one single IDE slot, therefore you may find that, the fully functional HDD cant be connected to the desktop any more..

Rather than thronging the HDD away or thinking of re-selling it, one nice idea would be using it as one large external USB plug n play storage device…

How to Convert a Internal PATA IDE (Desktop) 3.5″ Hard disk to an External USB Hard Disk ??

Hardware you need

All you need to do is purchase one external USB 2.0 Casing or enclosure for IDE drives… In India its around INR Rs. 600/- to Rs. 1200/- depending on the brand and also from the place where it is been purchased..

One may look like this,

External PATA Casing

USB 2.0 Port, please note that all new motherboard will have native USB 2.0 ports now !!!

Softwares you would need

Now days for large USB 2.0 you dont need any special software, all major new linux distros and Windows 2000 SP4 or later which includes windows xp sp2 and windows vista or server 2003 sp1 and later natively support USB 2.0 interface…

How you can do it ??

Open up the pack, it will contain the HDD casing, open the casing from the top end, and it will have connectors for IDE cable and the power cable, just connect them to your IDE HDD slots.

IDE PATA External Casing inside

Now put the casing cover back on and it may look like this bellow image,

Any external casing will come with external power supply adapter and one USB 2.0 dock cable….

External HDD Power cable

The Larger Desktop HDDs like normal standard 3.5 inch PATA IDE disk will need external power source to operate, this adapter will work with any 220 volt home power socket !!!

You may visit the store to purchase the product…

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