Proprietary Hard Drive

Does anyone know if the HP laptop hard drives are proprietary or not?

The reason I ask is that my dv9608ca laptop is dead, but I am 90% certain that the hard drive is fine. So I thought I would salvage it and use it as an external hard drive.

So I bought an external enclosure which is for 2.5" SATA drives. However, the prongs on the hard drive are twice as tall as the spot for them to go in, in the enclosure.

The reviews for the hard drive enclosure have been all positive, so it obviously works.

Any ideas??

 

SATA doesn't have "Prongs", so I'm thinking you might have a PATA drive instead, not a SATA drive. Think you could take a picture and post it, or say when you got it?

I'm thinking that laptop is before SATA was a stadard in laptops though, so you might have gotten the wrong enclosure.

 

The HD in your dv9608ca is a SATA HD so it should work in your external enclosure. There is a plastic adapter with pins that attaches to the HD so it can be mounted in the laptop. The adapter needs to be removed from the drive. It simply pulls off with a slight back and forth rocking motion.

 

Thanks for the quick response. I actually managed to just figure it out.

It is SATA (I made sure to check before I bought the enclosure).

What happened was HP had put an adapter on to the end of the drive's "connectors", which was then plugged into the socket in the hard drive bay itself.

I ended up checking on Youtube and all of the SATA connectors on the end of the drives fit into the connectors on the enclosure. I figured that I would see what would happen if I tried to take the end off my hard drive. And it worked!

 

Thanks for responding quickly as well! Is this adapter used with all drives/just 2.5"s/only HP's???

 

I can't answer that question with regards to other laptop manufacturers, sorry. As far as I know it is used on all 2.5" SATA drives used in HP computers.

 

No, older products (prior to 2008 I believe) used that adapter. The more recent HP products do not use that adapter. They only use a drive caddy to hold the HDD in place in conjunction with the screws that attach the access plate for the HDD itself.

The Adapter (in several variations) were used for 2.5" SATA drives in laptops.

 

Well I did get the laptop in 2007. I'm glad it got figured out before I disposed of the drive.