2.5 inch laptop hard drive in a desktop.

cabatex

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May 26, 2011
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I have a 2.5 inch SATA Hitachi 320GB 7200 rpm hard drive. I want to put it into a desktop system with SATA. I have read that there are power concerns about 12v and I have read that SATA is SATA and it doesn't matter. Can someone truly say for sure which is the case? I have not had any luck running this 2.5 inch drive in my desktop. I can see the drive in BIOS and see it in the operating system and I can see the SMART status showing the drive is healthy but I can not format read or write to it and I just don't understand what gives.
 
(1) If the 2.5" HDD was used as a boot disk in a laptop and can not format it, recommend that you delete all partitions.
(2) 2 1/2 in drives use the +5 V, and while +12 (and +3.3) are available on the sata power connecter only the +5 is internally connected on the drive
(3) One advantage of 2 1/2" drives is that they are more ruggedly constructed.
 

cabatex

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May 26, 2011
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No, I bought the drive new and never password protected the drive. I did load linux on the drive with luks encryption. I also wiped the drive with DD. I did not run a hard drive utility on the drive though, so I guess this could be a possiblity but I don't believe there is anyway for a password to just magically appear on a drive. I can put the drive back in my laptop and load linux on it with no errors, no prompt for password on my laptop, but it will not work in my desktop. I can only guess that perhaps there is some incompatibility between this Hitachi hard drive and the AMD SB710 chipset or some other driver on my ASUS motherboard or driver for these. I am going to try a USB 3.0 bridge and see if I can access the drive.



 
I used 2.5" drives when building desktops all the time, especially micro-ATX or mini-ITX systems. There is nothing technically different between the two standards, their merely different form factors. 2.5" drives tend to be targeted at notebooks and thus have slower rotation speeds and use less power, but there are cheap 7200 drives out there. And SAS drives tend to be 2.5" at 10 or 15K speeds.

Just treat it like any other HDD and everything will be fine.