Re: Do early thinkpad 750 cases accept replacement HD's?

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

On Mon, 28 Aug 1995, doug diamond wrote:

> There was some discussion once that early TP750's with 170MB HDs had
> a case that was not the same as later ones (eg. later 170MB disk
> cases were the same as the 340MB disk case).  Does anyone know if
> the early 170 case will still work with a new 12mm drive (e.g. the
> Toshiba 810MB)?  Any advice on this upgrade?

I've got one of those hypothetically different cases (we never did
find out exactly why they were different).  The only difference I
found was that when you screw the connector into the plastic case,
the pin receptacles are offset from the disk's pins by one pin (one
of the pins is missing on the drive, and on the old drive it lines
up with a capped receptacle on the connector.  On the new drive this
cap is offset by one pin).

I played with the flex-cable until I could force it to fit.  I was
concerned the solder joints would eventually break from fatigue,
but it's held up for over a year (including a dozen or so swaps
back back and forth from the original disk).

I don't know how any of this would relate to a 3rd party drive.
There is nothing physically different about the connector, just
the position it lines up at when you place the drive in the case.
If the 3rd party drive is smaller in width than the IBM drive by
about 1mm, either connector will work without problems.  If
they're the same, you may have to do what I did.
___________________________________________________________________________
John H. Kim        "A common mistake that people make when trying to design
jokim@mit.edu       something completely foolproof is to underestimate the
jokim@tuna.mit.edu  ingenuity of complete fools." -- Douglas Adams