How to use an old hard drive as an external drive?

Hey everyone.

I've got this ancient drive lying around—it’s about 15 years old, a Seagate 80GB ATA/133 HDD. It was working fine right up until my motherboard bit the dust. I'm wondering if I can just hook it up as an external drive to my current PC. I know external enclosures exist, but since this thing is such a relic (pretty sure it’s running Windows 98), I’m not entirely sure if that'll even work.
Also, any tips on how to check if the drive is even still alive?
Thanks in advance for the help.

- Yeah, you can, provided you grab an external USB enclosure for a PATA drive.
- You could also plug it directly into your current PC if your motherboard still has those old PATA headers lying around—otherwise, just grab a PATA-to-SATA adapter. Once it’s hooked up, you can run some diagnostics using something like CrystalDiskInfo or similar tools. If the drive isn't toast, you should be able to copy files, format it, and all that good stuff. Just a heads-up: make sure whatever computer you plug it into has decent antivirus software running first.
- Also, if there's Windows 98 on there and the drive is healthy, don't expect it to boot on a modern rig. It won't work because the hardware just won't talk to the old drivers sitting on that ancient drive.

Look, I’m not disagreeing with anything my colleague just laid out—if anything, I’d just take the whole concept of this project and slap a massive question mark over whether it’s even worth the effort.

Every single one of those components is going to cost you money—even if we're just talking about a few bucks here and there—and honestly, tracking down parts that actually work will be a headache in itself.
We're talking about a hard drive that's been sitting around for fifteen years, where you have absolutely no clue if it's even breathing or if it's already dead... so even if you somehow manage to get it spinning, who in their right mind would trust it with anything remotely important?
And don't even get me started on how clunky the whole setup is going to be—you've got this oversized enclosure, then an external power brick, then a USB cable snaking everywhere...

I just don't see the point in grinding away at this when you can go pick up a 64GB flash drive for maybe fifteen bucks—it's infinitely more reliable, there aren't any cables to trip over, and you can just slide the thing right into your pocket.

+1, if you ask me, it doesn't make much sense—unless, of course, you're some kind of old-school geek 😁

Thanks for all the input, everyone... 🙂

For some inexplicable reason, I find myself still clinging to an ancient 60GB hard drive, and if memory serves, I even went out and bought one of those little adapters a few years back just so I could plug it into a USB port as an external drive. When I finally make it home later, I intend to toss the whole lot straight into the trash bin.