Old laptop, what type of hard drive is this

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multi-tasking_guy

Limp Gawd
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Jun 16, 2017
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I found an old laptop at a thrift store, i went ahead and took out the hard drive because i wanted to install linux on it, then put it back in

to my surprise it wasn't sata, it turned out to be some sort of ide hard drive expect is it smaller than ide,
it won't fit on my ide cable

ive never seen this type before,

is anyone able to tell me what type of hard drive it is

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It's IDE, the 2.5" version. Uses a slightly smaller connector - usually just pins on the hard drive rather than a ribbon cable.

It would need an adapter to go to 3.5" IDE (the standard ribbon cable your thinking of) or SATA, they used to be not very expensive, probably still are just not as common.
 
oh i didn't know there was a smaller version, well looks like i'll have to install linux via the cd drive since i don't have one of those apadters and boot with usb is not possible with this old laptop


thank you
 
They still make cheap usb to ide / sata adapters. You could get one of those and plug it into a computer using USB. Of course there are also IDE 3.5 to IDE 2.5 adapters that include a molex connection for powering the 2.5" laptop drive. These things have always been pretty cheap in the past, so you could probably afford either adapter.
 
i found them on ebay for pretty cheap, but i can't wait that long,

luckily, i still have a cd burner installed on my new computer,

im going to burn a cd and install linux this way, i have a couple cds laying around and shipping from china always takes 3 months,
 
Those were very very common for laptops before SATA took over. As a matter of fact, I don't think I've ever seen any other kind of non-SATA hard drive in a laptop. There 44 pins for power and data all on the same interface.
 
This made me think of the time my old boss wrote to me about a laptop HDD he had removed. He couldnt work out the connector on it. Said it didn't match up with any he had seen before.

He sent me a pic and I immediately face palmed and laughed.

It was a IDE but it had one of those daft IDE pins to slot adapters on the pins that just slide off.
 
antok86 said:
This thread made me feel old
Click to expand...
My first own laptop still had an ide hard drive, I think I got it in 2003 or 2002. And got rid of it around 2009.
And I still use that old 60GB ide drive to record from SAT TV with my STB, it's in an USB enclosure I got dirt cheap.
 
reb00tin said:
I still have an old Thinkpad 770ED with disks like these, they're IDE, IBM made in Japan, only 5GB, slow and noisy. I used a flash drive adapter and replaced them with 16GB CF drives.

http://www.addonics.com/products/ad44midecf.php

Huge improvement :) since they don't make IDE anymore.
Click to expand...
This is the best option to get a working drive, CF adapters and cards are cheap and it will be MILES faster than any old IDE drive you can find
 
Someday someone is going to post a photo of a rotary dial telephone and ask the same question: "What the hell is this thing?" and we'll all laugh and feel old about it. ;)

And yes, when I saw the thread title I already knew what the drive connector was before I even opened the thread itself. :D
 
Tiberian said:
And yes, when I saw the thread title I already knew what the drive connector was before I even opened the thread itself. :D
Click to expand...
I don't know, it could have been one of those 2.5" SCSI drives, a micro SATA 1.8" drive, or those WD ultraslim drives with the SFF-8784 connectors. There's all sorts of weird stuff out there.
 
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