Hard Drive Form Factors Explained
October 9, 2008 by Michael Stankard
Filed under Hard Drive How To's, Hard Drive Reviews
This is the first article in a series that will explain how hard drives work, why they fail and what you as users can do to protect your data. When looking at hard drives the first step is to identify what it’s form factor is. Simply put, the form factor is the size of the hard drive and how it connects to your computer.
The most common type of hard drive form factor is 3.5 inch for desktop disks. Laptop hard drives are almost alwas 2.5 inch form factor. Almost all computers manufactored today for consumers and small businesses have either IDE or SATA hard drives with a normal 3.5 or 2.5 inch form factor.
Why Is a 3.5 Inch Hard Drive Form Factor actually 4 inches wide
The 3.5 inch form factor doesn’t actually refer to the physical measurement of width or height of the drive, but refers to what the size of the bay is on the computer. Originally the 3.5 inch form factor was used in reference to the size of the PC’s floppy drive. Today hard drives are typically smaller than their counterparts from 5 years ago.
Watch the video below for a visual guide to common hard drive form factors:
Laptop hard drives are 2.5 inch form factors and like desktop disks, can be either IDE or SATA. The video above shows the difference between the cables and power connections on the two types of hard drives. Today there is also a significant difference in hard drive pricing when it comes to SATA and IDE. When looking at hard drive recovery, we don’t charge more for one or the other.
Cool so an adapter for SATA to IDE would work on 2.5 and 3.5 form factor drives?
Yes, a hard drive adapter that converts SATA will work on either a 2.5 or 3.5 hard drive.
3.5 and 2.5 IDE drive however, need a special adapter. We have a video that shows how to hook up and slave a laptop hard drive to a USB enclosure that explains how to use a 2.5 to 3.5 form factor adapter
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I have a 750 gig maxtor external hd that is only a couple of months old and my toddler grand daughter accidently pulled it off my work table and it worked for a day or so but now all it will do is make a very low intermittent buzz, I was told by a friend who is a semi expert that the spindle motor is locked up. is this something that can be repaired and if so can you tell me aprox. what kind of charge I am looking at.
there is only about a 100 gigs being used and its mostly photos with some photoshop documents.
Thanks, Danny Harris
Danny, the best thing to do is give us a call at 727-345-9665 extension 203. Tell them you called from our blog and they will give you a discount : )
my old pc ’s mother board dont work it dont even power up ,sometimes and shuts down whenever, I want toget the data off that hard drive.it is 3.5 ide I have the usb/ide adapter but where do I get the power from do I need another adapter from hard drive to ac power? then I should just plug in the usb to my new pc ?
I’m convinced bearings are out of place in my motor. I’ve done extensive research in a considerable ammount of time (three days) and it is my understanding that this type of repair is the most costly due to the TEDIUM involved.
Seagate 7200.10 320GB of which only about 30GB is needed.
Please reason with me? I’m in a spot of bother here.
William S
Phildelphia Pa