Pin discrepancy in laptop hard drive

[DanielAkiraH]

The Toshiba hard drive on my HP Pavilion ze5400 laptop recently failed, so now I'm shopping for a new hard drive.

I notice that different 2.5" hard drives have a different numbers of pins.
The Toshiba one that failed had two columns, then a space, then 22 columns.
It appears that Hitachi drives have just the 22 columns, though it is sort of hard to tell... I'm just squinting at little pictures of hard drives on ebay.

After removing my hard drive and looking inside my laptop, it appears that my computer can only receive 24 columns of pins (which is funny considering that the Toshiba drive that was working in it would have required at least 25 columns of holes to satisfy all of its pins.)

BOTTOM LINE: Will any 2.5" hard drive work in my computer? Will the Hitachi drive specifically work in it?

Thanks for any help.

 

[fishmahn]

It should. All the drives use the IDE interface, which is a standard.

The probable reason for all the different columns of pins is space for jumpers for master/slave, test/regular, etc.

Mike.

 

[DanielAkiraH]

Thanks Mike.

 

[pat]

The 20 first pins are for ide, the last other is for power.. for each row..

 

[Crashman]

Laptop drives have power in the pins, hence you have more than 40 pins. There should be a pin missing in one of the long rows, that's for keyed cables.

Short rows of pins are present on many laptop drives for master/slave configuration. Since laptops don't have room for two drives, it's possible that some companies might omit the master/slave pins on certain models, and that's fine as far as your laptop is concerned.

 

[shata]

Ya laptop drives use Ide, just that they have more pins.