Re: Hard drive cases/connectors

["John H. Kim" <jokim@mit.edu>]

If the technical nature of this topic is beginning to bore a majority of
you, speak up so we'll know to take it to email.

In message Sat, 29 Oct 94 14:59:44 PDT,
  Don Whiteside <dwhite@shadow.net>  writes:

> So inspired, I poped open the case on my HD and took a look, and noticed
                 ^^^^^^^^^^
Much easier said than done.  :-)  I gave up until I committed to buying a
new drive.

> Two, very strange - the cable on my 170M drive was labeled 340M. _That_

Perhaps this is the reason some people (including me) found that the
connector doesn't exactly fit the new drive.  I suspect IBM wstandardized
dimensions between the 170 and 340 drives soon after production.  It seems
I got one of the older ones, and the 340 label on your cable suggests you
got one of the later ones.

> Three, are these standard 2.5" IDE drives? Could, for example, any
> size Seagate be used here?

Yes, they're standard.  That's why they're available as OEM drives.  To fit,
the drive has to be 17mm high or less.  Most of the 2.5" drives out are
19mm, and some (none over 250 MB last I checked) are 14mm.  You *might* be
able to fit a 19mm drive without a housing.

> Or does the TP BIOS only  support certain drive parameters?

I was told by two different IBM people (both in notebook development) that
the TP will accept any IDE drive that correctly responds to IDE queries for
number of heads, cylinders, sectors, etc.  i.e. it doesn't rely on a lookup
table in the BIOS for the hard drive information - it asks the drive.

A BIOS update was necessary for the 540MB and 810MB drives because they
exceed the standard IDE size limit of 512MB.  The new BIOS allows EIDE
drives which can be larger than 512MB.
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John H. Kim        | "Mike Espy simply forgot he was no longer a Congressman."
jokim@mit.edu      | -anonymous, on the Secretary of Agriculture's resignation
jokim@uni.uiuc.edu | due to conflict of interest charges for accepting gifts.
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