Connecting IDE-drive to Mac/Linux?

[BoxerRobban472]

Hi everyone!

I have an old IDE-drive with some photos I would like to transfer to my Mac. I have tried to do some research and found some regarding master/slave relationship, but I'm not sure if that only applies when connecting the HDD directly to the motherboard. I would therefore like to borrow your expertise my friends🙂

My end goal is to connect the HDD to my Mac via USB through some sort of adapter, and through that be able to copy the files. I have two questions regarding this:

1. Which adapter should I use/what should I look for in an adapter? (Or maybe, are IDE-drives typically plug-and-play or would that differ depending on the design of the adapter?)
2. The drive is most has the file format of NTFS. I don't know if Macs natively can read NTFS, but I do know there are ways for them to do so. What I wonder though, is if there's any point in using some version of Linux for this? Maybe IDE-drives are better supported in Linux?

Please forgive me if these are simple questions, I grew up some time after the days of IDE-drives and simply don't know a whole lot about them.

Thank you for your time!

 

[ocabj]

There are plenty of IDE (Parallel ATA) to USB adapters available. The one in my office drawer is a NewerTech from OWC.

You can read NTFS, but you'll need to use a FUSE module and then an NTFS fuse module on top of that. I/O will be less than optimal, but it will be good enough to read the data.

https://osxfuse.github.io/
https://github.com/osxfuse/osxfuse/wiki/NTFS-3G

I don't know the current state of the above projects. I haven't used the NTFS FUSE driver/module in years. I used FUSE in OS X mainly for SSHFS.

 

[BoxerRobban472]

There are plenty of IDE (Parallel ATA) to USB adapters available. The one in my office drawer is a NewerTech from OWC.

You can read NTFS, but you'll need to use a FUSE module and then an NTFS fuse module on top of that. I/O will be less than optimal, but it will be good enough to read the data.

https://osxfuse.github.io/
https://github.com/osxfuse/osxfuse/wiki/NTFS-3G

I don't know the current state of the above projects. I haven't used the NTFS FUSE driver/module in years. I used FUSE in OS X mainly for SSHFS.

Thank you for your reply!

I see, I might go with Linux then. From my (so far) limited searches on Google, many distros seem to support it out-of-the-box and if it isn't it seems fairly straightforward to allow read-only access for NTFS. Thank you so much for your input!

 

[ocabj]

I see, I might go with Linux then. From my (so far) limited searches on Google, many distros seem to support it out-of-the-box and if it isn't it seems fairly straightforward to allow read-only access for NTFS.

Well, the latest Linux kernels now have FUSE included in the kernel, but you still need the NTFS fuse driver, which may or may not be installed by default. Of course, you can simply just use the respective package manager to install that.

But given you're going to take all the effort to spin up a Linux system just to read that NTFS volume, you may as well just install the FUSE and NTFS Fuse modules for OS X.

 

[BoxerRobban472]

Well, the latest Linux kernels now have FUSE included in the kernel, but you still need the NTFS fuse driver, which may or may not be installed by default. Of course, you can simply just use the respective package manager to install that.

But given you're going to take all the effort to spin up a Linux system just to read that NTFS volume, you may as well just install the FUSE and NTFS Fuse modules for OS X.

Alright, I see. Thank you very much for your input, I'm going with OS X then! Thanks!