Recovering data from older hard drives

I had a friend tell me had saved many of his hard drives from older PC’s he had and wondered if he could hook them up and look and recover his old data. There are a number of ways to to this.  I suggested to him that he could use a hard drive enclosure or a some type of hard drive docking station. Most of which connect to your PC by USB port. They can be commonly found at places like NewEgg.com and Cyberguys.com and other geeky shopping places online. One thing to be careful of is the type of interface your drive has. Today the vast majority of drives have what is called Serial(aka: SATA) interface. If you’ve got a drive from an older machine chances are you have an IDE(or Parallel). Be careful when ordering to be sure which type you have. One will not fit into the other so there’s no danger hurting anything. Just the aggravation of having to get the right one. Good luck!