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Replacing laptop CD drive: What connector do most drives use?

R

RaiderJ

Diamond Member
I'm trying to replace my laptop's original CD-ROM drive, since it won't read burned discs. The system is an IBM Thinkpad 380ED.

I pulled the drive out of the system, and it looks fairly standard, but I want to make sure I can stick in another drive before I spend the money on one. The laptop's connection consists of a ribbon not unlike and IDE cable, but it has a connection for 50 pins, and then another 4 pins. This is what connects to the CD-ROM drive.

On the CD-ROM drive, there is a series of 50 and 4 pins to connect to the cable described above. The other end of this connector has a tiny ribbon connection to the actual mechanism of the CD-ROM.

So, is this a standard setup to where I can buy another CD-ROM drive? Hopefully one that read burned discs?

Thanks to anyone who can help!
 
The connector at the bottom of the picture is the most common for laptop cdrom drives Text
AFAK it is just called an 50 pin ATAPI connector
 
My connector looks a bit different than that... it has a 50 pin connector like the picture above for the IDE interface. Do all drives use that plug style connetor?
 
Laptops usually have a proprietary interface embedded in a caddy or sled. The generic drive has to be mounted in one of those so slip in and out in most cases.
 
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