Solved SATA hard drive for PATA laptop interface?

Greetings all,

I have acquired IBM R61i, on which FreeBSD is reported to work very well. However, the hard drive interface is PATA (IDE) and my current hard drive appears to be failing. I was wondering if anyone could recommend an adapter for the different SATA interfaces, e.g., M.2, mSATA.

The IBM also has the following interfaces:

One integrated, easy-loading modular Ultraba
One ExpressCard slot and one PC Card (Type-II) slot
One PC Card (Type-II) slot and one Smart Card slot

but I am not sure whether any of them could accommodate SATA hard drive.

Kindest regards,

M
 
There are PATA-SATA converters but the ones I've seen won't fit in a laptop and are more for desktops that have a bit more room.
 
A msata to ide converter(44 pin) with msata ssd should work to replace your harddrive.

br-interface-converterbr-ide-msatabr-renkforcebr-1391543br.jpg
 
Ah, yes. It's a bit difficult to see but this indeed looks like one for 2.5 inch disks. When replacing it in a laptop make a note of the height, 2.5 inch disks come in a variety of heights. They'll have the same 2.5 inch size but it's the 'thickness' that typically causes fitting issues. I've replaced disks in laptops before and sometimes get a replacement disk that's too 'thick' and won't fit properly in the slot.
 
The Ultrabay can take a variety of drives; typically the laptop ships with an optical drive (at the R61's price point and age, that was probably a CD reader). Alternatively, one can put floppy drives or a second battery in there. What you are interested in: there are also Ultrabay "carriers" which allow putting a second hard disk drive into the laptop. When Thinkpads were my primary laptops, I usually ran them with two disk drives.

The problem is: there is about a dozen different Ultrabay generations, which are usually mutually incompatible. For example, at home I have a few T20 through T22 laptops, which take an Ultrabay carrier that houses a second PATA disk. And then I have a few T60-generation laptops, and their Ultrabay carrier handles SATA disks. Those two generations can not be interchanged. I don't think one can use an Ultrabay carrier to convert a PATA-equipped laptop to handle SATA drives.

May I make a different suggestion: It is probably easier and cheaper to find a (perhaps used) PATA drive.
 
Greetings all,

thank you very much for your replies. It turns out that I am a moron, who misread the specifications because when I opened the hard-drive bay to check the thickness, I discovered that the drive is SATA.

Kindest regards,

M
 
There are PATA-SATA converters but the ones I've seen won't fit in a laptop and are more for desktops that have a bit more room.
I'm aware that thread starter has solved the issue but I post it nevertheless hoping someone else would find the tidbit useful.
I've used PATA-SATA converter in a laptop. Standard sized 2,5" drive would not indeed fit the HDD bay afterwards. Trick I used was to use SSD with smallish PCB which had it's plastic cover removed. Extra space used by PCB of a converter stopped being issue.
No AHCI obviously thus reduced life span and void warranty for the SSD but it worked after a fashion. I used Sandisk SDSSDP128G for the purpose. It's PCB is about as big as matchbox.
 
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