SPCR

any special mounting or connectors?

I expect it uses the same size IDE cable a desktop 3.5" harddrive does, but I want to make sure. Also, how do you mount a 2.5" laptop drive securely in a desktop PC case??

Greetings,

No, it needs an IDE/power adaptor. See some of the reviews here at SPCR:

http://www.silentpcreview.com/article207-page3.html

http://www.silentpcreview.com/article29-page2.html

It actually has a slightly different connector. Instead of have a 40 pin connector for IDE and a 4 pin connector for the power, it just has a 44 pin connector. You can find adapters on the internet or ebay. Mounting a 2.5" drive securly in a desktop can be done with a purchased adapter, but most SPCRers opt to suspend their 2.5" drive with elastic.

ah crud I hate complications.

thanks though, i'll look into those links

You can find adapter kits (with or without drive bay brackets) for not too much at local computer stores as well. You probably just have to ask them. It's not complicated at all.

Example from a store close to me (w/ more info):
http://www.ncix.com/products/index.php? ... ure=Others

There are a few SATA 2.5" drives out there, and AFAIK they use the same data and power connectors. But like others mentioned, if you get an IDE drive, you'll have to buy an adapter.

Thank you for posting this question. I was wondering that too.

I could not find one of these adapters in Newegg's catalog to go along with a Samsung order. I just ordered an adapter from this place.
http://www.adapterz.com/item.htm?id=60084

I've not found one at Newegg, but I did find one here.

Very good price, and IIRC fast shipping.

Looks like newegg only has ripoff prices for this.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6812116211
$17.49 + $5 shipping. Side rails for 3.5" bays are included, but you don't need or want those if you are going to suspend. I've bought the adapters for like CA$6 from local stores in Vancouver.

The only caveat with these adapters is that they can go in either of 2 ways. Only one is the correct way; the wrong way can burn out the drive. With all the adapters I've used, the writing on the adapter itself needs to be on the top side of the drive. Looked at from the top of the drive with the pins facing you, the power leads come from the left.

whew, you scared me for a second, because i allready ordered mine without any adapters, until i read that SATAs will work without any adapters... whew!

atlr wrote:Thank you for posting this question. I was wondering that too.

I could not find one of these adapters in Newegg's catalog to go along with a Samsung order. I just ordered an adapter from this place.
http://www.adapterz.com/item.htm?id=60084

Actually this one is the cheapest and comes without brackets:
http://www.adapterz.com/item.htm?id=60084

And this one comes with brackets to mount a laptop drive
inside a desktop 3.5" bay:
http://www.adapterz.com/item.htm?id=60083

Personally, I would recommend people to stay away from
using laptop drives inside desktops. Generally speaking,
laptop drives are a bit less reliable. Especially the well
known 30-40Gb Fujitsu and Toshiba fiasco.

I would rather recommend getting a queter 5400 rpm
drive and put a low RPM fan blowing at it. In one of my
computers I set such a fan from compgeeks for $3.99
blowing at drives screwed into the drive bay. The drive
screws into the drive bay via a self made "bracket" from
12AWG wire avail at Home Depot. Its strong enough to
hold the fan in place and thin and flexible enough to just
go through the screw holes of the standard fan and lock
there by bending. The beauty of this is - you can direct
the air flow to kinda be at an angle cooling down all the
drives you may have.

If you also put 50-100ohm resistors in series with the
12V power of these fans, they will spin at about 2,000 RPM
and are extremely quet. It usually provides a queter
effect to lower power supply fan speed like this and put
another case exhaust fan at half speed vs a full speed
power supply fan speed.

MikeC wrote:
The only caveat with these adapters is that they can go in either of 2 ways. Only one is the correct way; the wrong way can burn out the drive. With all the adapters I've used, the writing on the adapter itself needs to be on the top side of the drive. Looked at from the top of the drive with the pins facing you, the power leads come from the left.

Hey thanks Mike, I just came looking for that exact info!

I have the drive now and the adaptor and mounting bracket. Looking forward to firing this puppy up.

Hitachi Travelstar HTS721010G9AT00 (the new 100GB 7200rpm 8mb cache just reviewed against the new Seagate 7200).

Now I just need to figure out how to take the extra pin safely out of the adapter so it will fit into an IDE female socket. Hmm...

haha i tried to pull the stupid extra pin out (it came out) and tried it out and didnt hear the drive spin up and then noticed a wisp of smoke or two from the external USB drive enclosure i plugged it into to test, so something is fried, hopefully not the drive. oh well. we'll see.

Since the faint wisps of smoke came off the pcb board of the drive enclosure i'm going to take the safe route and toss the adapter (which was getting very warm to the touch when i saw the wisps on the enclosure's board and shut her down) AND the enclosure.

I just hope it didn't cost me a $200 drive. won't know now though until/unless I buy a laptop and toss the drive in it. or figure out some other use for this drive that just went from Storage to $200 paperweight in less than 20 seconds.

yacoub wrote:

MikeC wrote:
The only caveat with these adapters is that they can go in either of 2 ways. Only one is the correct way; the wrong way can burn out the drive. With all the adapters I've used, the writing on the adapter itself needs to be on the top side of the drive. Looked at from the top of the drive with the pins facing you, the power leads come from the left.

Hey thanks Mike, I just came looking for that exact info!

I have the drive now and the adaptor and mounting bracket. Looking forward to firing this puppy up.

Hitachi Travelstar HTS721010G9AT00 (the new 100GB 7200rpm 8mb cache just reviewed against the new Seagate 7200).

Here are diagrams from adapterz.com for proper connections
for the most common adapters:

1. cheaper wire-less / bracketless:


2. more expensive wired with brackets:


What is important is to see that PIN1 goes through.

Surprisingly, from my experiments on older 300Mb laptop drives,
opposite board orientation does not burn them. If you have easily
discardable drives - you can try. However pin-shifting does it. In
particular it burns the controller board. So if you have another
identical drive - you can use its controller to read the data if such
happened.

So it makes sense to doble-check that pin #1 from IDE cable
(red color) follows through pin1 marker/trace on the board
and goes into pin1 on the laptop drive.

yacoub wrote:haha i tried to pull the stupid extra pin out (it came out) and tried it out and didnt hear the drive spin up and then noticed a wisp of smoke or two from the external USB drive enclosure i plugged it into to test, so something is fried, hopefully not the drive. oh well. we'll see.

Since the faint wisps of smoke came off the pcb board of the drive enclosure i'm going to take the safe route and toss the adapter (which was getting very warm to the touch when i saw the wisps on the enclosure's board and shut her down) AND the enclosure.

I just hope it didn't cost me a $200 drive. won't know now though until/unless I buy a laptop and toss the drive in it. or figure out some other use for this drive that just went from Storage to $200 paperweight in less than 20 seconds.

Some enclosures/trays, usually the ones that use keys and are
advertised as hot-swappable have a transistor switching +5V
line on and off. This effectively drops +5V line to 4.7-4.8V making
laptop drives not work at all. The problem is - to upspin, laptop
drives need about 1amp on 5V line. Under such currents transistors
(such as in Genica trays) drop to less than 4.5V making upspin
impossible.

Also with enclosires you should be careful connecting the power
+5V GNG GND +12V connector properly. laptop drives only need
the +5V path. connecting +12V to them will definitely make the
power traces hot and can burn the drive too.

If connected to computer power supply, +12V can deliver over
20Amps thus completely screwing up the drive. If connected
to enclosure - its power supply will probably not deliver more
than about 3Amps. There's a chance the power supply will
start cycling on and off making some kind of whistling noises
in such case. There's also a chance the drive will be fried, but
it's a 50/50 gamble.

klankymen wrote:whew, you scared me for a second, because i allready ordered mine without any adapters, until i read that SATAs will work without any adapters... whew!

It's been a few days now... has your order arrived and can you confirm the SATA connectors are the same for the 2.5" drive(s) as 3.5" drives?

AZBrandon wrote:

klankymen wrote:whew, you scared me for a second, because i allready ordered mine without any adapters, until i read that SATAs will work without any adapters... whew!

It's been a few days now... has your order arrived and can you confirm the SATA connectors are the same for the 2.5" drive(s) as 3.5" drives?

They are. Don't you believe SPCR reviews?

Anyway I used the adapter the bracket came with (should have tried that first instead of messing with the bracket that had the extra pin) and my other USB enclosure and now it's fired up and working just fine. Now to format it...

Thought I would follow up to report the PATA adapter from adapterz worked as does the Samsung 40GB from Newegg.

The biggest headache was transferring form the old (and loud) 6GB to the new 40GB. Ghost 9.0 is dumbed down to only copy a partition at a time with the choice of the same size or all space on the drive (a copy function they misleadingly label "copy a drive"). I wanted to transfer the hibernation partition and resize it from 109MB to 600MB. Couldn't do that with Ghost 9.0.
My old copies of Ghost errored out on the XP NTFS partitions. Ended up going through many storage boxes to find the laptop's removable floppy drive so I could run Dell's mks2d utility to create a hibernation partition on the Inspiron 3800. Then used Ghost 9.0 with drives connected to the PATA 2.5in-to-3.5 adapters in my desktop system to copy the OS partition to the rest of the space on the new drive.

MikeC wrote:

AZBrandon wrote:

klankymen wrote:whew, you scared me for a second, because i allready ordered mine without any adapters, until i read that SATAs will work without any adapters... whew!

It's been a few days now... has your order arrived and can you confirm the SATA connectors are the same for the 2.5" drive(s) as 3.5" drives?

They are. Don't you believe SPCR reviews?

I must have missed the latest review. I checked the FAQ stickied at the top of this forum and didn't see anything that specifically stated that there isn't a "mini-SATA" or anything, much the way PATA IDE drives use mini-PATA. For example, notebook CD-ROM drives are also different as well, so it would only be logical to assume there's a chance notebooks would have their own mini-SATA, at least potentially.

Resistor, many many thanks for posting those images showing the correct orientation for 2.5"->3.5" IDE adapters. I've been tearing my hair out trying to find such information represented visually, because my adapter didn't come with any installation instructions.

I have the adapter set as in the pictures. I'm running XP Pro on TUSL2-C.

I booted from XP disk and it won't pick up the new drive which I set as the primary master. that is the only HDD on the machine. I can't set as slave because I can't get the jumper on with the adapter. I also booted from Samsung utility disk and no luck.
I have not tried to manually "load" or identify from the BIOS becausee I can't figure out the numbers to enter for Cylinder, Head, ands Sector. On the 2.5 drive the numbers I see are:

LBA 78,242,976 40.0GB M40 Rev A

1. MP0402h
2. E-H011-03-5451(B)
3. (only Chinese or Japanese)
4. 2005.01
5. (only Chinese or Japanese)

Do these numbers help?
Thank you, Steve

http://www.provantage.com/buy-110CBTR-c ... opping.htm

I use this one. Cheap. Very clear directions for mounting. Can't beat it!

I need to temporarily connect a 2.5" IDE laptop drive to my PC, just to get files off it and then wipe the drive. I had no trouble finding adapters meant to connect a laptop drive to a desktop but then I noticed my drive seems to have a weird connector. Instead of 2 rows of pins it's 1 big row of teeth. Anyone know how to connect this? The drive is a 40GB Hitachi Travelstar 4200rpm IDE model IC25N040ATMR04 from a 5 year old Compaq Presario.

Instead of 2 rows of pins it's 1 big row of teeth

Have a close look and I bet you'll see that it is an edge connector adapter. Pull it gently.

Even looking at it closely it didn't appear to be something that would just come off but I pulled on it anyway and you're right, it's just an adapter. Thanks.

Put your notebook drive into a Scythe 2.5" Quiet Drive, and now its the exact same size as a 3.5" drive. Most modern 2.5" drives use SATA, and they are indeed the same SATA connections as with the 3.5" drives.

So a SATA 2.5" HD inside a Scythe Quiet Drive and everything will be basically the same as mounting a 3.5" drive.

EDIT: oh wow, this thread is from 2005, who posted in this? Why didnt you start your own thread?