Month: March 2024

    So, with the modification being done here you can really use just about any SATA drive. However, unless you find a source of 12V somewhere on the laptop motherboard or come up with it somehow then you’ll probably want to avoid 3.5″ desktop size drives. Notebook HDDs and any SSD will happily run on 5 volts, as far as I know. That said, we need to get a bit creative though, because while the stock ODD connector does have power it only has 3.3 volts. That’s it, 3.3V some control pins and ground.

A full size SATA power connector shown, above our slim optical drive connector. You can see I already cut into it, leaving it open-ended. Check out the picture above. Take a real good look… See, I was thinking I’d cut the end off the power connector, and BAM! Instant expansion. This is here below illustrates what NOT to do:
    Why wouldn’t that work?? Well, look back to the second to last image — the one with the two connectors. The desktop / full size power connector uses wider spacing between the pins. So while as you can see I did physically plug this into a hard drive, the pins do not each land correctly one to one on a pad. Even if they did, the pins in the power portion of the slim ODD connector only have ground and 3.3v. For notebook drives we need 5v. For fullsize drives, we need 5v and 12v.

    First things first, this connector like most PCB mounted connectors has anchor points at opposite ends. These add mechanical strength and are soldered down to the PCB so that repeated plugging and unplugging of the connector doesn’t break the solder joints to the fragile data and power pins. To do this mod, we have to remove the power portion of the slim ODD connector. In doing so we loose half our mechanical reinforcement. So at a minimum I’d recommend either putting a generous amount of hot glue behind the data portion of the connector (which we do not want to disturb). Epoxy would be better.

Flush cutters I have found to work well for this purpose. Take your time, see how the material chips while cutting. When you’re close, switch to a file or sanding block — much better chance of not screwing up and going too far.

Part way done. I’ve stood up all the power pins, to carefully remove them without tearing PCB traces or damaging the pads. The pins were wiggled back and fourth, and fell right off.

   

Above is the result of much patient clipping, and even more patient filing. Here it isn’t totally done, but 99% there.

Not too shabby, provided you get gratification out of making your technology do things it was never intended to do. I’ve always loved hacking and modding, and for a simple home server application I’m fine with something like this. Important thing here is that the SATA data connector and lines are still the way they were from the factory. All we’re doing here is accommodating power for something other than a slim DVD burner.
I took a lazy route and just sliced up an old USB cable. This works for 2.5″ drives, but won’t work for full size desktop drives.
    There are certainly other places on a laptop motherboard to get 5 volts from. This laptop has two USB ports on board. There is also a third if used with another small PCB / ribbon. USB can supply 5 volts, and we don’t need to do anything crazy to get it. Many USB HDDs are entirely USB powered so I know that it can deliver enough for this drive as well.

And there it is in action! A passively cooled Pentium N5000 quad core, 8 GB of DDR4. 256 GB WD Blue SATA M.2 solid state boot drive, and now a 500 GB WD Blue SATA spinning disk for bulk storage and backups. I have the battery connected here as-well. It can run this board quite a while without a screen especially. This lets me feel a little more confident experimenting with things like write-back cache.