How to add an IDE hard drive to a SATA port?

You can get little things that plug onto the back of the IDE Drive that the SATA cable will plug into. Try Maplin. They cost about £15-20. Mine doesn't work too well, but maybe I was unlucky. You also have to adapt the power supply cable.
You can also buy an "External IDE enclosure" which is a box that the IDE drive goes into and connects with USB. This gives you the equivalent of the external drives that you can buy. That costs a little more.
If you just need to get the data out, you can connect it to the IDE cable that your CD or DVD drive is connected to, as most computers still use IDE for that. You need to disconnect the CD or whatever or make sure there is no conflict with the master/slave setting.
There is generally no need to install any drivers.

ElectricHippy
September 2009

Most of these units should be seamless on newer hardware. My experience is that they just work; they simply convert the SATA signals to standard IDE signals and don't really have any configuration associated with them.

Brian
September 2009