MBP - quickest way to get data off old IDE HDD's

[rawdawg]

I now have a MBP. I have two old IDE HDD I took from my old G4 before I sold it. They are 400Gb and 500Gb and are LOADED with data I need.

I bought a Universal Drive Adapter (IDE to USB 2.0) which I absolutely hate. My plan was to use the drives as external hard drives with this solution. The read speeds are pathetic to say the least. Absolutely crawling..... although you can write much faster. So for back ups it may not be so bad but I need an external for scratch disks for video content and heavy graphics...

So I bought a Buffalo FW400 1Tb drive. The FW400 BLAZES past the pathetic USB2.0 speeds of the Universal Drive Adapter.. But now I need to get my data off the old IDE HDD's... I've so far spent all last night and all today and it's been a terrible waste of time. Overnight I tried to copy a folder from the HDD to my Buffalo and it got hung up at 12Gb. Ditching that I tried to delete my old Timemachine to free up space on the IDE and it took 4 hours just to prepare the ~300,000+ files for deletion, after another 2 hours it only deleted 1/10 of the content so I gave up that too. I'm trying to copy of my music now and it says "7 hours remaining".

I'm willing to buy something to make this faster. I'm so unimpressed with this USB 2.0 adapter... am I doing something wrong?

Any ideas?

[gr8tfly]

If you're using any USB extension, try a direct connection with the adapter.

Otherwise, look for an IDE <> Firewire external enclosure. They even have them in FW800 flavors (I'm assuming your MBP has FW). Newegg would be a good place to look (or CoolDrives).

Even Firewire 400 beats USB 2.0 hands down, so I'm not too surprised at the difference in speeds.