Where to source laptop IDE hard drives?

I use mostly old computers. I have no reason to upgrade and they work. Except for their drives, which are starting to fail. I need new ones for two Thinkpads and an iBook G4. However before I buy I have two problems. Who do I buy from? I don't know who makes good IDE laptop hard drives, I only know Seagate and Western Digital are bad, as their drives break or corrupt themselves far more early than they should. How do I know the new drive will work with the laptop in question? With desktops it seems like as long as the IDE cable fits, it works. Is it much the same with laptops? There is also the issue of tight physical space. Any advice you could give me would be great. Photo is just something I wish I had.

>>681 If any of them have sd readers, a surprisingly workable solution is to use a sd card as your main drive If you're running machines that old anyways, chances are your OS is a small linux distro and you only have a couple dozen gigs of files on there Not too expensive to get a 64G sd card, probably cheaper than sourcing an old ide of the right format For bootloading, some bios systems can load right off an sd card, but not many Easiest solution if no direct boot from sd is cdrom with grub image on it and config to mount the sd card There is a system recovery distro that ships with a nice grub setup that's good for booting off weird soykaf, can't remember name though I ran a x60 for a while with a ghetto rigged sd card with arch linux on it. Was comfy

Have you tried PATA SSDs or modern CF cards with IDE adapters?

>>>682 I have given that some thought, but I have concens about speed. I have raspberry pis and their read/write speed, even with class10 cards, is way too slow for use with a whole OS and a few programs. >>683 >PATA SSD That is an option I had never considered, but I might now that I know about them. Thank you. >CF cards with IDE adapters I have some CF cards laying around. Might be cool, but won't CF cards run much slower than IDE drives?

i would reccomend the CF card to IDE adapter but hey, i have the same libretto! i need a charger for it though, know of a good place online i can get one?

>>684 Yeah, sd cards are gonna be kinda slow, filesystems that are optimized for ssds and disabling any logging services that make frequent writes might help some If you have enough main memory and are running a very light system you can just load everything into memory and run from there, not ideal though CF cards can be pretty fast under ideal circumstances, but the IDE to CF converters usually don't support high speed ATA connections, although maybe there are some that do, idk Even best case scenario though, as long as you are using IDE, the best transfer rate you're gonna get is 133 MB/s And even though sd cards are gonna have slower transfer, there's no disk head seek time since its flash, and so if you do a lot of random reads that might make the difference in transfer rate irrelevant

>>685 I'm so jealous.

If either of those thinkpads happen to be the T43/T43p, there's a mod to allow SATA drives, but it's fairly involved and requires desoldering a chip from the motherboard. Maybe look up something similar for your Thinkpads? https://forum.thinkpads.com/viewtopic.php?t=94308

Well, if anyone is still reading this thread, I bought a Compact Flash to IDE (For Laptops) adapter from china. I shall keep you posted when it arrives and how good it works.

>>2927 .....did I make this post while drunk? I just did that myself and am currently waiting for it.

>>1214 I love that computer so much, it's like a russian tank crossed with a miata: heavy and covered in armor, but also completely vulnerable because it's a convertible.

consider a ssd with an adapter a small ssd should fit inside the iBook along with the adapter, if you take the ssd out of it'ls case depends on how new it is there are also companies that make ide ssds although I'm unsure if their quality I'm sure they take advantage of how slow ide is to make sub par drives

>>681 Hey OP, you could try using a SSD. If you take the SSD out of its case, it should be small enough to fit inside an ibook with a sata to ide adapter. Maybe, would really depend on the ssd.. newer ones seem to be smaller You could also try those specially made IDE SSDs, although since people make them for IDE, I am sure they are very sub par since they do not think people will notice.. so maybe not. I cannot recommend a hdd maker to you because they all give me problems, WD and seagate all have big failure rates for me, and all the reliable brands seem to no longer exist...

>>681 I like the size and shape of the Libretto100ct, i imagine take out the motherboard and put a raspberry pi, triying to save the webcam and keyboard maybe with an internal adapter or something like that

I bought a KingSpec 2.5-inch PATA/IDE SSD years ago off eBay I think (I see them on Amazon right now). It had 1 bad sector but I just slapped it in the laptop and it's worked perfectly for over five years. Another option is to get an HDD to CD rom tray adapter. An old laptop might have an IDE CD rom (a special rectangular socket), but some of these adapters allow you to put a SATA drive in there. You lose the CD rom but get a SATA drive.

there's a lot of PATA SSD/HDD on the Chinese market like Ali*

>>683 >Have you tried PATA SSDs or modern CF cards with IDE adapters? This is a great solution. Alos I have an old working laptop IDE drive I'd sell you for cheap fren.

>>681 What's that thing you have in the PCMCIA port? Looks like a tiny projector but that couldn't be could it?

Sorry to bump such an old thread but honestly old PC's just make me feel "safe" for some reason, maybe it's because it reminds me of a time where everything you did online wasn't monitored for everyone to see.

>>6941 >Sorry to bump such an old thread but OT: i've just never got the whole "nonononon don't necrobump!!!! don't do it!!" mentality. I've been on the net most of my life, have always encountered it, never understood the reasoning: what's the alternative? is starting an entire new thread any better?

>>6943 I'm not sure I just feel the need to say sorry cause when I bump a new thread I get yelled at, if I post a new thread about a thread thats already been made thats about a year and a half old i get yelled at. pic unrelated.