Asked By
annmarie
610 points
N/A
Posted on - 06/08/2011
I have an old laptop bought about 3 years ago. For a long period of usage it was almost damage, the only thing that is working and can be reuse is the hard disk, the 256mb of ram and the sound card. The rest are totally out of order and unusable.
Now, I want to make a portable hard disk using my old one. And I’m planning to buy an enclosure case; the only problem is I don’t know what kind of connector needed for my hard disk. As far as I know there are two types of connector available on the market right now the SATA and IDE. How can I determine if my Laptop hard disk uses SATA or IDE connector?
 Please also correct me for the terminology that I’ve used. I’m also confused about the difference between a hard disk and a hard drive.
How to determine a SATA or IDE connector?
How to Determine SATA or IDE Connector
Hard Disk Drive and Hard Drive are both the same in meaning. Hard Disk Drive or HDD was use to name a disk inside your computer. It is hard not just because it is in the form of iron or metal, it has also a large amount of space and also fixed inside your computer hardware.
We called it as Hard Drive or Hard Disk to shorten the common name of Hard Disk Drive. Before, the time when we are using a Floppy Disk, we name a disk in two different ways. One is the high density and the low density. Another one is the Double sided and the single sided.
We have mentioned the High Density which acronym is HD similar to Hard Disk. These two are deference in meaning; High Density was used for high capacity of floppy disk while HD is the physical technical name of Hard Disk Drive.
By reading the manual of your laptop you may determine what kind of hard disk drive you have inside your laptop. Without your manual, you need to disassemble your laptop to extract your hard disk drive.
Most of the laptops nowadays, hard disk drive are easy to extract ore removed from the computer hardware. You might found a screwed covering at the back of your laptop with engraved or embossed marking looks like three cascading disk. Just unscrew the covering then you will see inside it your hard disk drive.
Determining the type of your hard disk drive through the physical form of the hard disk drives requires knowledge or familiarization of your typical hard disk drive. You may consider the size of the hard drive as well as the dimension. The 2.5 inch hard disk drive was used for laptops while the 3.5 inch hard disk drives were used for desktops.
We have also some sort of variance when it comes to laptop hard disk drives. Today, laptops are considered or known as note books, net books, EeePC and laptop itself. Note books, some net books and laptops are using the 2.5 inch hard disk drives.
Some net books and EeePC uses memory as their hard disk drives. Memories used for this kind of laptops are not so large at capacity. They were just like a USB (Universal Serial Buss) flash drive. EeePC and some netbooks are used normally for browsing and surfing the internet. Word processing are also commonly known to netbooks and EeePC.
Hard disk in different variance like 2.5 inch and 3.5 inch also comes in different types. There are 2.5 inch hard disk drives in SATA or the Serial ATA (Advance Technology Attachment) format.
Serial ATA hard disk drives are the new technology or the current technology of hard disk drive today. The same with 3.5 inch hard disk drives that also comes with Serial ATA format. The other of the hard disk drives in both sizes is the IDE hard disk drive. IDE means is Integrated Device Electronics (IDE).
IDE was previous technology of hard disk drives. IDE hard disk drives are connected through a parallel cable directed to the Motherboard.
IDE hard disk drive connector composed of 40 pins for 3.5 inches and more than 40 pins used on 2.5 inches. Cables or connectors for this are combined into wide parallel cables.
Serial ATA or the SATA hard disk drive has only 7 pin connectors in both sizes which is very thin compared to IDE.
How to determine a SATA or IDE connector?
Hi Annmarie,
Why don’t you look at the manual of your laptop look for the hardware specification, but if you don’t have your manual anymore then just look at the image below,
 IDE has a 40 pin connector but SATA has only 7 pin connector, but they are both in physical size (2.5 inch).
Hope this can help.
