It may help some folk to know about an interesting "toy" I found about a
week ago at Compunation. Vantec IDE-USB cable. With power supply and
laptop drive adapter (also IDE), $22 and change.
Seems to handle drives fine, with 2 notes:
1) make drive MASTER, or ...
2) Watch for USB extensions. I had one that wasn't shielded and it
"worked mostly" which is actually worse than not at all due to
intermittent errors.
Otherwise seems very useful for cleanup of old disks, since they can be
hot swapped. I"ve put a switched powerbar on the power supply so I don't
have to pull the plug etc. as I decommission 4 older machines, each with
multiple drives.
JN