Hell yeah!

My old laptop was mostly still working post fall, everything except the hard drive and screen survived the plummet. I was planning on making the laptop into a home file server when I upgraded, the crash sped this process on somewhat.

So I had a 1 terabyte Western Digital 'green' drive that I wanted to pair with the laptop. First problem, the drive was too big. After a brief session with a hacksaw, and then a cordless drill, a space large enough to accommodate the beast was made, and it was plugged in. Huzzah!

Second problem, the laptop  doesn't supply 12 V to its SATA interface. OK, cool, whatever. I'd just use an external hard drive caddy enclosure to power the hard drive, and a cable from the laptop's SATA controller straight to the hard drive for data.

Third problem, the laptop's SATA connector was female, so hard drives can slot straight in. Normal SATA cables are also female, so I needed a gender bender. Altronics and Jaycar had nothing suitable, and I eventually sourced a male SATA -> female SATA cable from an online store over east. Oh, it was $20 including postage and handling. For a fucking cable. Oh well.

Anyway the cable arrives, and my hodge podge setup works a treat! However I'm left with another hard drive left over from my old server, a 500 GB PATA one to be more precise. So I got to thinking that I should buy ANOTHER external hard drive caddy, one with an eSATA port for the SATA drive, and use the current caddy for the PATA drive. OK, another caddy bought, cool.

Fourth problem, my current gender bender cable didn't mate with an eSATA port. The pin-outs for SATA and eSATA are identical, but there is a little bit of extra plastic on the SATA cables. I removed the offending piece of plastic, and the cable slid in perfectly! Unfortunately, the consortium for some reason made the the pin spacing in eSATA and SATA connectors slightly different!

No worries, I've got a spare eSATA cable, I'll just chop one end off and wire on the male SATA connector from my other cable. I dutifully noted the orientation of the plugs with a marker pen, stripped back the rubber from the connector, and soldered the wires on (under a dissecting microscope). Woo. Anyway, I got home and plugged the connector into another cable and noticed it was wired on upside down!

Fifth problem, I broke the connector. After despairing for a second at the thought of having to resolder the connector I pulled the two cables apart. However, the plastic part of the male connector remained wed to the other cable and the pins came out, left dangling to the end of my freak cable. Another second of despair until I realised that I could put the pins back in, upside down, and the wiring would be correct!

A little bit of fiddling, the pins went in, the cable plugged into the laptop, and the eSATA port on the caddy, and the laptop started up. It recognised the disk and booted.

It's hardly an elegant solution, but it works!