Not travel-related per se, but I figure someone here will have the answer. I have a 500 GB IDE drive I'd like to put in a new box that only have onboard SATA. Is there some kind of enclosure or adapter I can use to be able to use the IDE drive with the SATA box?

There are PCI-IDE cards you can put in the new box. Of course you can get a USB-IDE housing to hold the drive also.

Not sure if this is what you are looking for. It seems this adapter is good for external HDD:

HDD Adapter USB To 2.5/3.5IN Sata & Pata

It depends if you need to boot OS from the IDE drive. If so, you will need a SATA to IDE bridge. You will need one that has 40 pin female so it can plug into your IDE drive.

If the drive is just for storage, then an USB solution would work just fine.

You have three options on how to hook up the ide drive to a SATA only system...
1. External USB casing. This would be my first recommendation because for about $25 you have an external hard drive you can use with any computer which makes backing up and moving files a breeze.
2. Sata to IDE converter: there are a few models available that are about $20 shipped from newegg.com
3. PCI or PCIe IDE controller: Expect to spend maybe $25 on one of these. I would avoid this option because one of these cards will abb about 5-10 seconds to your system boot time when it searches and initializes the drives.

I would suggest going with the external USB casing. For the convenience you get along with the ease of setup I think it's the best option.

+1 on external USB IDE....i typically get SATA on external now as well, but IDE is still available!

Why bother with an old IDE drive in a system that doesn't have an IDE connector?

Drives are so cheap, it might not be worth doing it, unless it has some important data on it. In that case an external enclosure would work just fine.

-David

Thanks for all the thoughts, y'all. It's a 500 GB drive that has a lot of music and movies and stuff on it, and it's not really an old drive - just a drive that I put in an old computer.

In any case, I'll probably go the USB enclosure since I'd get a small, cheap SATA drive to boot from. Or maybe a CF card...now there's a thought.

Also check here.. www.monoprice.com. Very cheap shipping.

If your computer has an eSATA port, you might see if you can find an external case for your IDE drive that also has eSATA.

I have no direct experience, but I hear it's a very fast data transfer system.

I don't know if IDE to eSATA external enclosure is even available, and even if it is, it would be very expensive and probably more than purchasing 500G SATA drive.
It will be cheaper to just buy PCI IDE controller card or USB enclosure.

My Thinkpad will boot from an USB drive.

Windows, as typically installed on a hard disk, will not boot from an USB drive. Additionally, USB has less bandwidth and higher latency than directly attached PATA or SATA drives.