External case/toaster/etc to test and clean up old 3.5 drives?

brennok

[H]ard|Gawd
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I have a bunch of old 3.5 drives, mostly 4tb and under, I want to go through. Most should be Sata, but I might have a few IDE. I want to be able to test the sata drives once cleared to see if I can potentially reuse them if needed, but I also want to copy and clear and content I might have forgotten to remove over the years.

Does anyone have anything they like whether it is a JBOD external enclosure, toaster, etc? I definitely want something that is easy to swap drives, but don't want to spend a ton since once I am done I will probably only use it occasionally.
 
I have a single disk Sabrent USB 3.0 dock with the hinged dust cover. It works fine for testing drives. I think the newer versions come with fans in them to cool the drive. I've used it several times to test drives with SMART and dd. Works fine, but the drive does get hot without a fan.

I also bought the Icy Dock hard drive trayless drive bay doohickey that will take two drives--a 3.5 & 2.5. I haven't tried it yet, my current desktop doesn't have any external drive bays, but I am planning on swapping desktop cases.

Both of these are SATA.
 
I think Sabrent does the best on this.
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07Y4F5SCK/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_i_3SVVW7Q3WMDR5A8S59Q2?_encoding=UTF8&psc=1

If you have drives that are just random that you need to access the 5-bay is the most convenient option. Don’t be fooled. It’s literally an HD dock, it doesn’t have any raid functionalities and each individual drive can be powered up and down.

Is that too much? If so, select one of the 1 or 2 drive options on the same page for the more traditional “toaster” options.

For IDE I generally just recommend finding an IDE to USB converter cable. Usually they’ll be combined with packages for external power. It’s rudimentary, but at this point most people dealing with IDE is for recovery and not consistent use. So it’s “good enough”. Something like this:
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0758RP5V8/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_i_7KAH4FAAPZN6DW4XP69V
 
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There are a million options on amazon under "HDD docking station". I used a thermal take one for ages, but I can't remember the name and you probably won't find one for sale. Sabrent seems to be a brand thrown around a lot. Really, anything is going to do what you need, in the data realm.

For the IDE drives, I always just went to a thrift store and found an external enclosure that accepted IDE drives. Seem to find them there a lot.

Edit: for some reason I cannot paste Amazon links in here, sorry! There are plenty in the $30 range.
 
I think Sabrent does the best on this.
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07Y4F5SCK/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_i_3SVVW7Q3WMDR5A8S59Q2?_encoding=UTF8&psc=1

If you have drives that are just random that you need to access the 5-bay is the most convenient option. Don’t be fooled. It’s literally an HD dock, it doesn’t have any raid functionalities and each individual drive can be powered up and down.

Is that too much? If so, select one of the 1 or 2 drive options on the same page for the more traditional “toaster” options.

For IDE I generally just recommend finding an IDE to USB converter cable. Usually they’ll be combined with packages for external power. It’s rudimentary, but at this point most people dealing with IDE is for recovery and not consistent use. So it’s “good enough”. Something like this:
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0758RP5V8/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_i_7KAH4FAAPZN6DW4XP69V
Forget my post. I would grab that sabrent dongle listed at the end here. I just bought one myself lol
 
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Yeah there are a ton which is why I didn't know if anyone had luck with any specific models. I have read in the past of some that corrupted the drives.

I will probably grab that Sabrent toaster. I think the 5 may is more than I want to spend.
 
Yeh, usb dock is what you want, I have a Thermaltake one, sev yrs old, works great.
Ide? Smash with a punch an 3lb hammer, Toss them. Not really worth anything money wise..
 
Yeh, usb dock is what you want, I have a Thermaltake one, sev yrs old, works great.
Ide? Smash with a punch an 3lb hammer, Toss them. Not really worth anything money wise..
unless you want to pull out the magnet first.
 
Yeh, usb dock is what you want, I have a Thermaltake one, sev yrs old, works great.
Ide? Smash with a punch an 3lb hammer, Toss them. Not really worth anything money wise..

I have no plans to reuse them, but they were from my old WHS server so want to make sure I actually pulled off everything before scrapping them. It would be nothing important, but no clue if I left anything on there when I switched from WHS to Synology.
 
If those ide drives are still working, I wouldn't trash them, but just give them away. Either locally or here in the freebies thread. Sometimes you just need an actual ide drive when trying to restore a piece of older hardware.

As far as a good way to test them, I get a simple esata external enclosure or dock. A lot of times the usb ones don't do smart and things like that and esata is easy enough as a lot of the enclosures even come with an esata bracket.
 
The Sabrent is working great, ended up with the one drive.

It turns out the old drives are SATA. I was thinking they were IDE since I remember the hot swap bays used molex for the connectors in the Norco.
 
The Sabrent is working great, ended up with the one drive.

It turns out the old drives are SATA. I was thinking they were IDE since I remember the hot swap bays used molex for the connectors in the Norco.
Cool, which is the exact model? I know I've got one of their older external enclosures that's both ide and sata and it wasn't soldered very well and broke. They sent a brand new one and told me to keep the other one.

Sweet--if they're working, pass them on. There are also some situations where an older sata drive is needed for a system restoration. Just post them to the freebies thread and they'll be gone before you know it.
 
I just ended up with the one bay of the one linked above. https://www.amazon.com/dp/B075GJ3P3B

Not sure I will do with the WD Reds, but the older green drives and earlier I may do that once I finish going through them all.
 
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