Thanks RB. Again, this is not really for your consumption, but for readers less experienced as yourself. Here's another thing I've done for friends, but it only works incrementally with moving up to OS's like windows.
Say you have the XP, and the newer standard of sata after IDE. We'd get a new system back compatible with sata, which still are plenty. This was usually with working drives and the people didn't know, or want to actually try to the transfers. So, the new system had say win7 and you boot it up as purchased. Then turn it off, installed the old drive as sata 2 or whatever on the MB and when booting it up again, windows for the last 15 years has automatically recognized an unknown drive as a slave, gives it a drive letter and 95% of the time people can find and use their old data. This is usually a stop gap until they went with the proper transfer of files if able. The other issue with this technique is you're not speeding up your computer for the most part. And every older drive installed this way is always slower than what you just bought.
The problem I'm running into now is SSD and newer bios. New bios (of course even these are older now..) are optimized for SSD and the trim features which I understand help SSD maintenance. But newer SSD with larger capacities happening all the time have also been improved. All my drives are sata and I may have to go your route to get into SSD and yet preserve my file structure. Win11 may or may not throw a major wrench into the upgrading cycle. But I'm unfortunately at the crossroads.
