I have a bunch of old hard drives (molex/pata), and a test system with a PSU that's SATA only. I also have a older PSU with no sata power plugs from a system that died ages ago, which i know works - i shorted out the sense and ground cables to power up and test some cd rom drive related projects.
Unlike the CD rom drive project, i need to power up the drives long enough to get any data on them out - up to several hours.
I'm not hugely worried about the drive - I am more worried, if there's a chance i'd fry the motherboard. ASCII scribbles attached. the big box is supposed to be a CPU but my art skills suck
The host PC's PSU is SATA only, and is needed to power the big SATA hard drive that will contain copies of the disks in question
ground + sense cut
+---------+ and twisted together
| | ^
|---------| |
| | |
| | |
| | |
| | +-----+------+
| | | PSU |
| | +------------------+ | +--------+ |
| |pata data PATA DRIVE | Molex | | | |
| +---------->-----------------| | | | |
+---------+ | |<---------+ | | |
+------------------+ | +--------+ |
| |
+------------+