Ehhh Pin out for a SATA connection

[almoststew1990]

I bought a laptop SATA cable thing to put a SSD in my laptop. It plugs into the motherboard just fine with a little H shaped thing but the "normal" SATA end is missing a bunch of pins for the power connector.





So it's missing a bunch of fairly important pins. Does anyone know what the one I got is meant for? optical drives or something maybe?

My laptop refuses to power on with a drive plugged into the adapter (but powers on fine with the adapter connected up with no drive attached).

 

[demonix]

Are you sure the cable you purchased is the one used by your laptop as like with modular PSUs, it's possible that the power lines aren't going to the correct pins on the drive end which might be causing the no power issues when a drive is connected as it might be stopping power from going down the wrong lines (or it could be shorting to ground).

From the looks of that power connector, it only has the pins for 5vDC with some ground pins which would most likely be logical for drives that would only require 5vDC power.

 

[IT Troll]

Yeah, that is a mini SATA connector which combines power and data and is typically used on slimline optical drives. You can get yet another cable/adapter to convert from mini SATA to regular full size SATA, if you can't find a single cable with the ends you require.