Trying to access sideways SATA drive

korbas

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Jan 16, 2012
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I'm trying to recover some data from a HD from a laptop. I removed the drive, went to plug it into a SATA enclosure and realized the pins are way too big. Looking back inside the machine, the pins are mounted sideways. How convenient.

After a little research I discovered a few things...

1) SATA drive manufacturers are sadistic and apparently make these things in order to give people trouble in the future.
2) No sideways SATA wires are available. Enclosures might be, but that remains an open question.
3) Manufacturers and vendors seem to omit the sideways mount from product information just to make life more interesting.

How can I access this drive? Is there in fact a way, or am I wasting my time? Should I just find a usable laptop and/or start doing surgery on a standard SATA wire in order to adapt it to sideways mount?

This is the drive in question. BTW, notice that it doesn't say anything about "sideways mount pins" on the label and even the diagrams appear deceptively straight-on.
http://www.hddsupplier.com/fujitsu/fujitsu-120gb-mhv2120bh-pl-pn-ca06672-b25600c1-sata-2-5-hard-drive.html
 
Interesting, I took the #'s off the website you gave and found nothing of what you described. It is a normal SATA HDD, nothing special, and a little old. Some laptops require a funny connector/adapter to go from the HDD to the laptop mount. Make sure that you have removed all of the laptop manufacturer's housing equipment or it will not fit in a normal enclosure.