old hard drives

I pulled a couple of hard drives out of a couple of computers and I was wandering what I would need to do to use them as a second hard drive for backup.One is a western digital Caviar 21000 and the second one is a western digital Caviar2540.

What would I need To do to make them external?

Thanx
Brian

 

First of all download the diagnostic tool here . Check the drives if everything is ok with them. When they are ok then you can set them either as slave on IDE0 or master/slave on IDE1. What you have to do is to set the jumpers on the HDD's back and plug in the IDE-cable the right way - red mark on pin1 (motherboard) and beside the power plug (HDD).

 

Well, to connect them internally, you should just have to jumper them as a slave, and connect them to the second connector on the cable. Of course, connecting the power is required. If you want to make them external, the easiest way is with a USB 2.0 IDE disk cabinet, they start around $50 on Pricewatch, though I'd want something a bit larger in the cabinet. I have a pair of 120gig drives in the USB 2.0 cabinets, very handy for backup.