OLD hard drives

i am trying to sort out some drives from some computers from a mate that have passed away, but i am having some problems with a couple of old EIDIE ones, I have an old caddy one of the drives came in, USB to EIDE, but the drives I put in, even one of my old ones click slow down and then speed back up again, then do the same thing. They will keep spinning if not connected to the computer via the USB.
it sounds like a problem with the caddy more than the drives, I even used a computer PSU to power the drives just in case it was the PSU of the caddy.

I thought I had a old computer here with EIDE, but that don't work either, But to be fair it is not my machine, but my next door's neighbour's son, and he said there was a problem with it.
i am thinking whihc is the best thing to do, I don't want to spend a lot of money on this, so maybe a Sata to EIDE adaptor?


Cheers peeps.

I'm surprised the old power supply didn't solve the problem, as many of the really old 3.5" or even 5.25" IDE/EIDE drives (40 or 80 conductor Parallel ATA interface) pull a LOT of current via the 12v line.

They generally can't be powered from a USB adaptor for this reason, and colleagues of mine saw this power up/power down/power up/power down cycle when trying.

In reply to a post by jchamier:

I'm surprised the old power supply didn't solve the problem, as many of the really old 3.5" or even 5.25" IDE/EIDE drives (40 or 80 conductor Parallel ATA interface) pull a LOT of current via the 12v line.

They generally can't be powered from a USB adaptor for this reason, and colleagues of mine saw this power up/power down/power up/power down cycle when trying.

The caddy has it own PSU, but I thought maybe it has a problem, which is why I tried a computer PSU, the caddy PSU have been left on for over 2 years.
I have found while looking for something else a very old AMD As Rock board with Sata and PATA and when i done a quick test yesterday I got a display from it, so I am going to boot a Linux distro from a USB memory stick and see if I can access the drives that way. I found a heatsink and fan to put on it, but it is very ;loud
All it is to do is to copy some files to a NAS.

Just putting a 32 bit version of Linux onto a usb stick now
The things i do for people

Well, that old motherboard done the job, it was an AMD dual core 64 bit processor, only had 1GB od ram in, but I found another 2 sticks 4GB each.
That little board is now safe and sound in a box, just in case it is needed again