Okay so I pull the back off my Lenovo Laptop, inside where the DVD drive is supposed to be is a plastic blank, and there is no SATA port where it would be. But on the MB is a little female plug that takes the ribbon cable for an optical drive! Sooooo I want to find a SATA plug with a ribbon cable attached that can go on a 2.5 HDD so that I can put it in as extra storage in the big space where the DVD drive would be and plug it into the optical drive port on the MB. What is the set up that I am looking for called plz? SATA to ribbon cable? SATA cable adapter? Something like that??

kiwibookhunter - 2021-06-18 21:30:00

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azza20 - 2021-06-18 21:49:00

Without knowing the model number of the Lenovo it's a hopeless task trying to guess the part number.

But look, it it was Flex 2-15 then the part that connects to the little female plug is: https://tinyurl.com/2y89zr73

Personally, I think if you want extra storage for you laptop, just connect an external USB drive and then if that's not enough you can get a second drive, or a bigger drive.

gyrogearloose - 2021-06-19 07:25:00

Yeah you can also get micro USB sticks which are barely noticeable when plugged in.

nice_lady - 2021-06-19 07:38:00

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muppet_slayer - 2021-06-19 07:41:00

great thanks gyrogear, that's the one. "optical drive board with cable". Yea I know, iv already got an external drive. BUT it isn't about that for me, it is about the learning and the challenge to make it work :)

kiwibookhunter - 2021-06-19 16:47:00

Desktop hardware uses common standards. But inside laptops its a free for all and the other end of that cable might only suit lenovo proprietary optical disks and won't fit a sata hard disk. I couldn't tell from the pictures.

So the more common way of learning is to use desktop hardware, adding memory, disk and video cards. You can pick this stuff up in inorganic collections and there's common standards where if it fits, it should work. But with laptops there can be specific Lenovo cables with exact part numbers and brackets, and nothing is free or easy.

To give an example of the worst kind: laptops often use ribbon cable connectors, which is what you're looking at. You cannot assume you can connect any 20-pin ribbon cable to a 20-pin header, such as a keyboard or optical drive. They all might have 20-pins; but what Lenovo or Dell assign to each of those 20-pins is up to them, it's not interchangeable.

Edited by gyrogearloose at 7:54 pm, Sat 19 Jun

gyrogearloose - 2021-06-19 19:42:00

Okay..... thx Gyro. Good thing I came here to ask first lol. I will forget all about that and go back to using my external drive :)

kiwibookhunter - 2021-06-22 17:26:00