Re: vendor for hard drives

[Don Whiteside <dwhite@shadow.net>]

On Thu, 30 Nov 1995, Thor +ivind Jensen wrote:

> I can now easily solve the "box"-part of this, but need a lot more 
> courage and advise to solve the "connector"-part. I think there are 
> people in this group that have solved both problems, but to me ist 
> seems that the ribbon cable from the special connector goes inside 
> the disk housing so that it can not be changed without removing the 
> disk cover (breaking warranty labels)

Doing "transplant surgery" on the drives is pretty simple. In a nutshell:

The only label that you need to move is the one with the /////// on it 
telling you where to puch to seat the drive. If you peel up the two 
corners of this, you will see the only two screws you need to remove. 
Remove them, but me careful not to drop the hex nuts on the other side - 
they can fall out and be lost forever if you're not working in a clean space.

The only other thing necessary is to pry the clips on the side open. If 
you look at the side of the drive, you'll see these plastic clips kinda 
like what you'd have on a life preserver. The easiest and safest way to 
clear those is to gently pry above the clips, starting with the end near 
the connector. Keep slight pressure outwards to keep them from 
refastening and you can open all 6 clips w/ no problem.

When you do that and open the case, you find the drive just sits in 
there. The only thing really fastened down in the D connector that sticks 
out the case. It's just a 44 pin flat connector on one end, similar to 
what you'd find inside a desktop machine connected to an IDE drive 
(except this is _44_ instead of the standard IDE 40, because of the power 
lines) a ribbon cable and an AMP D connector on the other end.

Simply pull the 44 pin connector off the old drive and plug the new drive 
in. Pow, done. Hook it all back up and put it away.

The ONLY thing I've begun to wonder about is only relevant if you have a 
dock with another IDE drive in it. When you pull the IBM drive out, you 
discover it's unjumpered. I put my Toshiba back in jumpered as master, no 
slave, but I wonder if it shouldn't be slave present for docking 
purposes. Any speculation from anyone, or anyone put in a drive jumpered 
the way I did and manage to use it successfully with a dock and 2nd ide?