Which kind of hard disk is this? (7 cm × 9,5 cm, 48 pins)

Question

My girlfriend has an old laptop-drive she wants me to grab data from. I want to buy a usb-adapter for it, but I have no clue as to which kind of disk this is. There are no text printed on the drive except from "Made in China" and "F4".

The hard drive's size is 7 cm × 9,5 cm excluding the pins. It seems to be 24 columns of pins with 2 rows, (24 × 2 = 48) pins total. It is a small space between two columns of pins and the other 22 columns.

^{(Click image to enlarge)}

Its hard to tell from the picture, but it looks like this hard drive might be in an enclosure too. So the other answers aren't wrong but it may be easier to get at the hard drive without its enclosure. ...Or not perhaps too. — mkingsbu, May 25 '17 at 16:40
This is the miniaturized 2.5 inch or laptop version of PATA/IDE. It is electrically compatible with the 3.5 inch 40 pin version plus the separate power harness, but not mechanically compatible without an adapter. — Chris Stratton, May 25 '17 at 18:00
Oh I didn't realize it was that small. Hard to tell from the picture. That makes sense. — mkingsbu, May 25 '17 at 19:17
Any USB adapter with two IDE choices will work. You can still buy these as an SSD, — mckenzm, May 28 '17 at 03:51

score 78 · Accepted Answer · edited May 25 '17 at 07:43

78

That would be an IDE (PATA) drive. The pins to the side are for jumpers, not the cable:

(image from flylib.com)

Given how antique these are now, I suggest a USB to IDE and SATA 2.5" drive adapter as being of more use, and of similar cost, usually.

edited May 25 '17 at 07:43

Overmind

10,098

answered May 24 '17 at 20:35

Ecnerwal

5,234

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Hi! I already have a SATA 2.5" adapter bought here - but I could not get it to fit. Am I doing something wrong, or should I get a PATA adapter? (Is there a difference between PATA and SATA 2.5"?) – OleDid May 24 '17 at 20:46
Yes, they are very different. The adapter I'm suggesting has (for the one I own) a PATA connector on one end of the board and a SATA connector on the other end of the board - depending which type of drive you are working on, you plug it into the one it fits in. A Serial ATA adapter will not work with a Parallel ATA drive. – Ecnerwal May 24 '17 at 20:49
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@OleDid -- The USB adapter that you already have should suffice; it has three disk interfaces, not just the SATA. If it didn't fit, then you're doing something wrong. The connector marked #3 in the photo should fit that 2.5" drive connector. Ecnerwal is giving you misleading advice. – sawdust May 24 '17 at 23:32
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Turns out I was doing something wrong. I tried again and it worked :) Problem solved! – OleDid May 27 '17 at 23:04
Excellent result. Can you please post it as an answer explaining what you did? – SDsolar Jun 05 '17 at 00:04

score 46 · Answer 2 · answered May 24 '17 at 20:40

46

From the connector it's easy to see it's a PATA disk (as opposed to a SATA), which is supported by the fact that its from an old laptop.

You can either connect a PATA-to-USB converter, or use a 2.5inch PATA to 3.5inch PATA adapter and hook it up to your desktop.

answered May 24 '17 at 20:40

kabZX

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Thank you. I accepted Ecnerwal's answer because they were first, but I would have upvoted you if I had enough reputation. – OleDid May 24 '17 at 21:01
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You do have to be careful of "old laptop SCSI drives" which are casually / visually similar to "old laptop PATA drives" but quite incompatible. – Ecnerwal May 24 '17 at 21:01
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Do note that any somewhat recent desktop PC will no longer have an IDE/PATA connection. My old Core 2 machine has one, but my i7 machine most definitely doesn't. – Baldrickk May 25 '17 at 07:34
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@Baldrickk I've specced and bought a couple of moderately high-end machines recently, and they do have PATA sockets. But we're speccing motherboards with a lot of PCI-E slots so maybe we're into "ship all the connectors" territory. Also PATA was used in mass-market desktops for optical drives even a couple of years ago. Even that wouldn't be much use if the OP doesn't have cable any more. – Chris H May 25 '17 at 10:49
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@ChrisH It's definitely a rare breed that still ships with PATA headers on the motherboard. I mean, I have a bunch of new high-end systems with Core-i chipsets that even have ISA slots, but it's definitely specialist territory for new builds with these dinosaur techs still intact. – J... May 25 '17 at 11:46
@ChrisH yes, I think that your board is "the exception that proves the rule" in this case. I'm not 100% sure on this, but could the eradication of the seperate Northbridge when moving from Core to iSeries processors be one of the main forces behind this? I also have to admit that I haven't built an AMD system with hardware from the last decade, so I'm not up to date on archetecural changes. It could be that it survived longer on AMD systems? I don't know. – Baldrickk May 25 '17 at 12:32
@Baldrickk It was an Intel chipset on the last machine that had one -- the CPU was a minor consideration compared to the IO, but presumably an Intel CPU – Chris H May 25 '17 at 12:35
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@Baldrickk the north bridge removal wouldn't have anything to do with the general disappearance of PATA ports since they were controlled from the south bridge. What's driven it was Intel and AMD removing it from the southbridge. At that point instead of just routing traces it required adding a controller chip instead of just routing traces which increased the BOM price by a dollar or two. They've been gone from mainstream boards for a long time. Neither of my mainstream LGA-1366 boards (first generation Core-i7) boards had them. – Dan Is Fiddling By Firelight May 25 '17 at 14:43
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Newegg doesn't list anything newer in regular consumer mobos than LGA775 (Core2) or first generation atom with them. Supermicro has a bunch of server boards some of which are a bit newer than that (saw one LGA1155); not sure what the newest is there since I'm less familiar with server class boards and a lot of what they had were multi-socket boards. (And IIRC there was a period when a tiny PATA flash drive stuck in the connector was sometimes used on otherwise diskless rackmount servers). – Dan Is Fiddling By Firelight May 25 '17 at 14:45
@J... Are those ISA slots actually useful for many of the old devices? I don't really know, but would assume, that some of the associated circuitry that common old ISA devices would be looking for wouldn't exist anymore. Or can you still just install DOS or whatever and go wild? Having said that, I think such boards are very expensive now, right? – underscore_d May 25 '17 at 18:00
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@underscore_d Yes, they're useful - otherwise we wouldn't go to such lengths to get special industrial motherboards with them. For our devices, XP is end of the line for support so they'll be on the way out eventually but for now it all still works. Nothing too special with ISA - it's all still there (MMIO, DMA, IRQ... still at the bottom of bare metal even today). – J... May 25 '17 at 18:34
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@underscore_d the use which springs to my mind is old science kit, things like X-ray generators are very expensive and very long lived, the limiting factor eventually becomes the availability of a machine which can control something designed and built in the 80s. I know a professor of Geology who still has a 286 powered desktop chuntering away in his basement, still running the same experiment it was bought brand new for 35+ years ago. – Joseph Rogers May 26 '17 at 13:25
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@JosephRogers Oh, sure, I wasn't questioning the usefulness of the old ISA devices themselves; I myself collect loads of retro kit (albeit not ISA-based). My question was about whether the new motherboards that still have the old ports actually work with all/the majority of said devices. I dunno why I was so sceptical, but here we are! :-) – underscore_d May 26 '17 at 13:47
@DanNeely so I was incorrect about the specifics, but on the right track. Thanks for the correction! – Baldrickk Jun 01 '17 at 10:00
@underscore_d ISA is still lurking on your mobo in the form of the LPC which multiplexes an ISA signal onto a small number of higher speed lines. It can be de-muxed to connect to a standard ISA slot. – Dan Is Fiddling By Firelight Jun 01 '17 at 11:14

Which kind of hard disk is this? (7 cm × 9,5 cm, 48 pins)

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