I have a Dell Mini 12 (1012) with a missing hard drive. The hard drive is PATA (IDE / parallel ATA) with a small ribbon cable that goes directly into the drive. Finding a compatible drive for low price is difficult.
Many online sites show disks that have pins coming out as being compatible, but they are not. Many other sites show disks with only one view, making it hard to tell if the drive needs the more conventional cable (for pin connection) or not. Here is a photo showing the cable in place and the size/case for the original drive:
- Can I replace the ribbon hard drive cable with one that connects to some other 1.8-inch internal disk?
- Can I use some other device as internal storage, perhaps by routing USB internally to a flash drive placed where the IDE hard drive would normally be? - A large external bootable flash drive is not ideal but seems to be my best option so far.
See the Dell Mini 12 manual, click on Replacing hard drive.
The MyDellMini site is a good source but at present I cannot post questions there (registration issue). I’ll ask there also (when registration issue is fixed) and cross-post as solutions are figured out. MyDellMini also has info about running a Mac OS X or Chrome OS or Ubuntu on this convenient small laptop.
Note some models in Dell Mini line use SATA. This one is definitely PATA/IDE. Related info I did find this thread discussing PATA on Dell Mini 12 but SATA on some other models in line.