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Found this old DVD driver in the garage that looks like it was from a laptop. I’d like to use it, but I don’t know what port is that.
I thought it was SATA, but it’s a little bit more taller and narrow, maybe an old revision? Or is it HP proprietary?
Any help is appreciated!
Slimline SATA.
Usual for laptop DVD drives. Can be directly converted to regular SATA with an adapter (I have one of those).
Alternatively, you can find a caddy for it on AliExpress for around 6 bucks. Pay attention to the height, there's 12.7mm and 9.5mm drives.
I bought this one: https://a.aliexpress.com/_Ewv1ers
Woah, thank you!
I’ll keep that in mind!
Just to add, you can get hard drive adaptors that fit in the same slot too, so you can have extra storage. They come in a DVD drive shaped caddy with pass through connectors for a laptop SATA drive 🙂
Thank you for the tip. I’ll definitely look into that, do you recommend any in particular?
I love these, far more useful than an optical drive. The only difference between them will be the bezel, which varies to fit different laptops' shapes. They are completely passive; no components except maybe a capacitor to prevent a power surge when hot-swapping.
No, I've always just used whichever cheap one matches my needs :)
Damn man, good info. I didn't know about slim sata, looked like sas at first glance.
To add to that, since its an HP branded one, it might have a special front bezel to go to a specific laptop model. Those bezels are removable with just a couple clips.
AFAIK, HP doesn't actually manufacture the drives themselves, just the bezel. They just slap an HP branded sticker on there.
I was trying to get a specific bezel for a zbook for a little while and HP wants like, $100+ for a damn piece of plastic they already have in stock