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I've been trying to save my older hard drives
By Sosthenes

When buying an enclosure for your IDE drive, it is important to know what DMA your drive and case uses.  DMA stands for Direct Memory Access because information is read from your hard drive and it bypasses the CPU and goes directly into RAM for better speed.  DMA is therefore the speed that your hard drive operates at.

When trying to select an enclosure, I?ve seen claims that the enclosure works with ?all IDE drives?.  The problem is that I called a manufacturer and their representative revealed that their enclosure was really ATA 133 which means they weren't previously revealing what the product was.  If you have a computer with Windows 95 then there is a possibility that it has a hard drive with ATA 16.  If you have a computer with Windows 98, there is a possibility that if your hard drive was manufactured in 1999 and that it could be DMA 2 (ATA 33).

The problem is that hard drive enclosures with DMA 16 and 33 can be found but finding a case with all of the DMA modes available means that you will probably pay $50 for it.  I found a case from New Egg that was around $18 for ATA 33 but I?m not sure if it is worth it for saving an eight gigabyte drive.  I found a case with just ATA 16 in it but there isn?t a lot of upwards compatibility for expansion and it is cheaper to buy new technology that will last longer.  This information is important so that you have an idea that you aren't buying the wrong case.

DMA 1 is called DMA 16 or ATA 16
DMA 2 is called DMA 33 or ATA 33
DMA 3 is called DMA 66 or ATA 66
DMA 4 is called DMA 100 or ATA 100
DMA 5 is called DMA 133 or ATA 133