What kind of hard drive is this?

[polycat33]

I pulled the hard drive out of my old PC and am considering putting it in a hard drive enclosure to use as an external hard drive. What do I need to know about the hard drive in order to get the right enclosure? Will my Mac be able to read any files off of it if it came straight out of a windows XP PC? As in, can I access a few files on it before I reformat, or do I have to reformat before I can use it at all?

Lastly, how hard is it to put a hard drive in an enclosure? Does the enclosure have to have a power plug or can this hard drive be bus powered if I get the right enclosure?

Attached is a picture of the hard drive.

[Lovesong]

Do you... google?

http://www.pcstats.com/articleview.cfm?articleID=951

It's a desktop 80GB Maxtor Hard drive. It will fit into any 3.5" ATA enclosure. You will have no problems reformatting it to FAT32, and having both Windoze and Mac read the drive. The Mac, however, will not write to it (this is a partitioning table thing).

Any of these will do. It takes 2 minutes.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList.aspx?Submit=ENE&N=2000090092+1053807123+1054107130&name=IDE

[CanadaRAM]

http://www.seagate.com/www/en-us/support/knowledge_base/

Search: D740X-6L

Key Features:

* Maximum Capacity of 80.0 GB
* Fast ATA/Enhanced IDE compatible
* Data Protection System
* Shock Protection System
* Ultra ATA/133 Data Transfer Rate
* 2 MB SDRAM Cache Buffer
* 8 ms average seek time
* 7200 RPM

Installation Guide: (PDF format)
Click Here (http://support.seagate.com/rightnow/downloads/ata_installation_guide.pdf)to access the Basic Installation Guide.

You should be able to read the data from it whether it is formatted FAT32 or NTFS.
You should be able to read and write to it if it is FAT32

[polycat33]

Thanks. Yes I do google, however I know nothing about computer hardware and looking at that sticker there are a TON of different letter/number combos on there and as I said, knowing nothing about this kind of stuff I didn't know WHAT to google.

Is it possible to get an enclosure that is bus powered or does that depend on the hard drive and not the enclosure? And I understand that my Mac can read hard drives formatted Fat32 or NTFS, but does it change anything if it actually has windows installed on it? I guess I'm just looking for a straight answer to this question: if I put the drive in an enclosure and plug it into my comp for the first time, can I get files right off of it (as if I were getting them off the PC itself)?

[apfhex]

Is it possible to get an enclosure that is bus powered or does that depend on the hard drive and not the enclosure?
You attach an ATA/IDE ribbon cable and a power cable from your enclosure. AFAIK all internal HDDs work this way.

if I put the drive in an enclosure and plug it into my comp for the first time, can I get files right off of it (as if I were getting them off the PC itself)?
Yes. If it's FAT32 you can read+write, if it's NTFS you can read only.

[Nermal]

And for future reference, take a picture of the connectors next time :)

[polycat33]

I was going to add a picture of the connectors, and when I came back to the thread two people had already commented that the answer was totally obvious with the info given... :rolleyes: