SATA? More than one type?

Let me start with saying that my experience has been limited to IDE drives. IDE is the only type of drive connection I have dealt with for over 15 years... That being said...

I have a Toshiba Satellite laptop. The OEM HDD is a 100GB SATA drive. I now have gotten a Western Digital "My Passport" 320GB external HDD. It too is a SATA drive. So I happily yank the HDD out of my laptop with the intention of swapping - putting the bigger drive in my laptop and the OEM laptop drive in the external case. Both are SATA drive so no prob, right? Yup...

The original drive is a Hitachi Travelstar. The Western Digital has pin connectors, different than the original drive. I figured there would be some sort of adapter to make it USB (like my larger IDE based external drives), but this is beyond me.... Is there something I need to do to swap these drives, or are they simply not compatible?

Drive on left is the new Western Digital. Drive on the right is the original laptop drive.




Thanks for any suggestions!!

 

Looks like they are playing games with the Sata interface, so you cannot use it in other devices, cheap shot Western Digital !

This is some sort of new sata interface for external drive enclosures., no adapter that I know of to use it in a laptop.

Google returns very little info for that model number WD3200BMVV

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That was my guess too, that WD is using a new interface to prevent people from doing what I want to do. And that's pretty stupid... people who buy this drive to swap it with a laptop drive will just take it back... so they end up losing sales....stupid...

 

Call Wd and explain your pblm

 

I ended up returning the original My Passport Essential (to a different store) and getting an older version of the same drive. The enclosure is slightly larger and has the removable USB interface. After some research I discovered the newer versions of this model were slightly slimed down and WD physically changed the drive to accommodate the non-removable interface. Drive swap worked great and have successfully upgraded my laptop. Thanks for the help!!!

 

Glad you got it going...

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Thanks...and you were right about WD changing to make it impossible to swap. Which as I said is stupid. Why do they give a crap what the consumer does with it, they are making a sale regardless. Limiting compatibility = limiting sales.

 

I'm only posting to this thread because I see more and more threads involving both WD My Passport and My Book external drives and wonder if the proprietary drives are being used in both applications, and if so, how many of the problems are caused by the proprietary drives.

It seems to me that WD wants to lock a customer who purchases one of these drives into only using WD products.

In this particular thread if the OP has a drive failure, he is locked in to using a WD proprietary drive if he intends to re-use his enclosure. If the enclosure adapter fails, the drive can't be installed in another enclosure because of the proprietary interface.

I believe if a person is interested in purchasing a WD pre-assembled external drive they should ascertain before purchase if the enclosure uses a proprietary drive. If the drive is proprietary the intended purchaser should look at another brand of external drive that does not use a drive with a proprietary interface.

The only thing that will wake manufacturers up who try to lock purchasers into their products is for purchasers to refuse to purchase their products as long as components are manufacturer proprietary.

Mumbodog was exactly correct in post #2 where he stated it was a "cheap shot".

 

It also makes it impossible to get your data off the drive if the enclosure fails, what crap is that.

Hopefully someone will manufacture an adapter cable to access the proprietary drive.

I have been building my own external backup drives for years, until recent years it has been cheaper to do so, it is about break even now if you buy the hard drive and enclosure when on sale. They are not as pretty, but who cares, no me..


WD is going downhill, I have seen way to many WD drives failing in Dell PCs recently, and not that old either, under Dell warranty.

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I've also seen lots of failures with WD drives lately, mainly from the external WD drives.

In cases like this it's too bad the OP didn't do a video of this "mess" and post it on YouTube. YouTube has gotten to be great tool for exposing manufacturers shoddy products.

 

I have 2 750gb WD Green drives in a Raid mirror enclosure, wondering when one of them will die, hopefully not both at once....eeek.

Bought them before WD started having problems, so maybe I'm safe.

xing fingers



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I have 10 enclosures. For the most part I use WD drives, however they are mostly 320GB drives.

I've just seen too many problems with drives >500GB and I don't trust them. From the way things are going I'll eventually have to use 500GB or larger cause smaller drives are getting more and more limited.