Procedures to Slave A SATA Hard Drive Via USB

This is very useful information, with so many people not having access to the internal tower or with people trying to use their laptops or even worse someone else’s laptop/desktop computer USB has become a more viable option. So here is a new revised How To Slave A Hard Drive blog.
First just like before we are going to need to remove the affected (nice word for broken) drive from what ever machine is holding it hostage. If it is a tower then the original How To slave a Hard Drive post will work just fine to get the drive out. If it is a laptop then please see the How To Slave a Laptop Hard Drive post.
Ok so now that we have the hard drive out of the machine lets move on to turning it into external USB storage, like your own personal My Book.

Above you will see what I consider just your standard run of the mill USB enclosure. You can usually pick these up for 25-45 bucks depending on where you go to get one. Walmart, Bestbuy, and CompUSA all sell them.
Now there is going to be some way to open the box up depending on which brand you bought.

One piece is the case and the other is what we need to hook the hard drive to. Lets grab the hard drive hook up piece or the GUTS if you like.

Now you can see here that I have an IDE cable but NOT SATA which now-a-days could be a real problem with out the proper adapter to go with it. Generally when they sell these chassis they are going to come with everything you need in order to be able to plug in any hard drive type i.ex. IDE, SATA, LAPTOP IDE, LAPTOP SATA. Make sure when you buy the enclosure that your drive is supported or that you get the adapter you will need in order to make it work. Below see a picture of my adapter.

This is the side that plugs into the enclosure.

This side plugs into the SATA hard drive.

Here we see that I have connected the IDE to SATA connector to the internal power and IDE cable on the enclosure.

This is the underside of the SATA hard driveand where we will need to connect the IDE to SATA adapter.

Now, i take the end of the adapter that will fit in to the hard drive and connect the drive to the enclosure.

When you are done it should look something like this. Now if this is for Hard Drive recovery purposes then I would advise not stuffing it back into the case part of the enclosure. If this is for you to use as an external hard drive there are a few things I would like to say.
Make sure it has a good size fan in it.
It should be made of aluminum
The chassis with the mesh covers are awesome, excellent for airflow!
Ok so taking the idea that I am using this to recover my data I now need to connect the USB cable and the power. Buying one with its own external power is a good idea because then you are not dependant on the port to power the drive.