How do I find out what connection my laptop HDD uses?

My laptop is about 6 years old and the HDD's about to give way so I thought I'd get a new one and copy an image over.

How do I find out what type of connection my laptop uses? Eg is it SATA or whatever? Might be a bone question but I'm not really aware of the different types and if they've changed much in the past 6 years.

Do I need to think about this or is it not an issue?

3

5 Answers

I'm going to assume that you are using Windows. If you are then you can try this.

1. Open a command prompt window. Either use WinKey-R, type cmd, and press enter or look for Accessories -> Command Prompt in the Start Menu.

2. Open the device manager by typing devmgmt.msc in the command prompt window and press enter.

3. Look for the category named Disk Drives and expand it.

4. Since you are using a laptop there should be only 1 hard drive and thus 1 entry. That entry should give you the model number and possibly manufacturer for the drive.

5. Google for it. The description for the drive should almost immediately tell you whether it is SATA or PATA.

FWIW, the next time you ask a question please include details such as what operating system you are using. It helps when trying to answer to have some context to work with.

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In hindsight it came to me that it would probably help to see how the drives connectors differ. So after Googling about a bit, I came up with the image below from this site..

The above may not actually be a very good comparison pic. The SATA drives I'm familiar with all have a protective half-shell surrounding the contact pads. They look like the drive in the picture below. Or you could also look at the product pictures for this HITACHI Travelstar 5K500.B at newegg.com.

You have 2 choices -

1) Google the laptop model and lookup the detailed specs
2) Take out the hard drive and look at the connection

5

You might try Speccy.

I opened my HP Pavillion zv6000, which was built in 2004, and discovered that my crashed hard drive was a 40GB IDE drive.

Noticing as others did that the price of a 500GB SATA drive was comparable to an 80GB IDE drive, I looked for and found this Serial ATA TO IDE Converter Board available for $20. I'm going to try it -- $70 for a new drive and adapter is cheaper than a new laptop, and I can still use the drive when the laptop gets too slow for me (which is not likely to be soon, because the screen conked out long ago and I've been using it as a file server).

4

Well, it's either going to be a SATA (more probably) or a variant of PATA/IDE

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