Hard drive caddy, what to expect?

[ericmark]

I have over the years had computers fail, and I have removed the hard drive before scrapping them, as a result I have a few hard drives which may or may not be good, as it seems power supply problems took out many of my computers, so it could have wrecked the hard drive.

So bought a caddy to get info off these hard drives, and some worked well, but some asked to be reformatted, I did not do this, except for one, it was a brand new hard drive in a data port that I had never got around to fitting, clearly marked 340 GB each, two drives in the data port.

This when reformatted showed around 900 MB. The caddy takes SATA, IDE plus cards etc. However I seem to remember when the large hard drives came out there was a problem with some PC's where they could not see large drives, so how can I find out if the docking station at fault or the hard drive?

 

[mattylad]

Before accepting to format them:
Try another docking station.
Try a Linux live CD and the docking station.

 

[JohnD]

I have used caddies in the past, when I did backups on rotating generations. but now just have a disk cable and take the side off my PC as I do it so rarely.

Not quite so handy but the tech is simpler.

 

[ericmark]

I have moved from desk top to lap top, and know what went wrong with desk top, power supply failed, so it may have taken out the hard drive when it went, so easy way to get those pictures not duplicated seemed to be a caddy, but I have a few hard drives knocking around, one in my hand says 320GB but in caddy reports size as 799MB this one I knew empty so allowed it to be formatted, but many just say needs formatting, so still have a load of drives not a clue what is on them.