You realize of course, that external enclosure aren't exactly front page news, not have they been for more than a decade?
The trouble here is, you can buy high capacity external drives for only a few dollars more, (and on sale, sometimes less), than a comparable capacity internal drive..
Depending on what type of data you're trying to archive, older low capacity drives, say 100 GB to 250 GB, are next to worthless for home theater, music, or photography applications. I have them all over the house.
Brand new 2 TB Seagate standard home HDDs, are frequently on sale for as low as $50.00.
I'm still amused and bemused, about your penchant & motivations for starting threads as questions, which you then provide the answers.
FWIW, USB flash drives are now available in 256 GB models, for the same money as an external enclosure. At steeper prices, you can buy thumb drives up to 1 TB.
Since USB 3/0 is reasonably fast, with the convenience of plug and play, I'm not sure that resurrecting older low capacity HDDs is a worthwhile pursuit, particularly PATA drives. In fact I"m not entirely sure today's mobos even provide a PATA buss..