What is a laptop hard drive adapter
If you ever needed to use a laptop hard drive on a desktop computer you will have met one of the worst kind of incompatibilities. Laptop hard drives are built in the 2.5 inch standard, while PC hard drives are built in the 3.5 inch standard. To properly use a laptop hard drive you will need a laptop hard drive adapter. Typically these will help you connect the laptop hard drive to the IDE cable. The price range for such an item is at around 15 bucks, although if you really search you will find better deals. Of course you might wonder why on earth you don't transform that laptop hard drive into an external hard drive. This is a really good question and indeed you can quite easily transform such a hard drive into an external one with the added advantage of speed and plug and play capabilities, but I'm afraid that this will end up costing a little bit more, because you see external hard drive require an enclosure and an even more complicated adapter between the interface of the hard drive and USB or Firewire (depends on which system you use) so for short term solutions a laptop hard drive adapter still remains the best solution. My favorite brand of adapters is Adaptec. They really specialize in putting odd paired technologies together and this is no exception. In the early days when these adapters were prohibitory expensive one might have attempted to construct an adapter of its own. As far as I am concerned this option is still available, because the challenges involved were really not that spectacular. The standard used on laptop hard drives is just a scaled down version from its PC cousin, so once you have the schematics it really shouldn't be that much of a deal. But again given the fact that these adapters are so cheap who would bother today to do such a thing. I really miss the old days.
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