Frustratingly familiar connector

[tlhonmey]

I've got a connector for a laptop hard drive which I am hoping to be able to find. It's a 30 pin connector, 1.25 inches in width. Horizontal separation on the pins is just over 1.25mm (Guessing about 1.27 since that seems to be a common pitch.) After spending most of the day hunting, I finally realised why it was so familiar. It's the same form-factor as the connectors used on the old "Slim" ATAPI CD drives, only with fewer contacts.

Same external dimensions, and interlock keys, but the one I'm trying to match only has 30 pins.
Mine has "F3415A" printed on the side of it, but that series of numbers seems to match a few thousand connectors, none of which look anything like it.





(Sorry for the low picture quality, my good camera has gone missing)


Even just a hint about what plugs of this form-factor are called would help. I'm not having a lot of luck narrowing the searches down without knowing what to call the darn thing.

 

[73's de Edd]

sir tlhonmey . . . . . . .

The above should be the male counterpart to what your blurry female connector shows . . . . .as needing a mating male 15 pin SATA connector . . . .take note of the 15 count as they are being redundant for reliability. Just in case you were previously researching it as being a 30 pin.
You weren't specific, as to its wiring breakout needed, so consult all of these pics, to see what possibly might meet your needs .

https://www.google.com/search?newwi....1c.1.64.img..0.2.97...0i8i7i30k1.uuxOj23GtD0



73's de Edd

 

[tlhonmey]

Sadly no, that's a standard SATA power connector. I've got a few thousand of those lying around. This one is entirely rectangular with two offset, triangular keys pointing forward on either end to ensure correct rotation. The external size and shape resemble the old "slim" PATA connectors commonly used in laptop peripherals, only with 30 pins instead of 50. And there are definitely 30 solder tabs coming out the back of it, so it's not just a redundant 15 pin connector.

The female half of one of these, only 30 pins. You can see the triangular keys sticking out on the upper corners of the top one. I can't find any good pictures of the drive side of it unfortunately, it tends to be too shadowed.

I'll see if I can find my good camera to get some better pictures. The connector is for a GD8000 drive pack (which is obsolete and no longer manufactured at this point) if that helps. The local junk store just got several hundred of the computers, but they're useless without their drive cages, which are practically unavailable.

Given the budget for the project, I can offer a $75 tip for the best source for the connectors, assuming they're actually available anywhere. (Excluding hunting down complete drive cages and tearing them apart, obviously. If it comes to that I'll disassemble the laptop and solder something straight to the board. But you wouldn't believe how many screws there are in these things -- they make the HP engineers look like amateurs -- so I'd really rather avoid doing that.)

 

[tlhonmey]

After a bunch of research, the connector used on PATA CD and DVD drives is a JAE-50 pin.

So, logically, I'm probably looking for a JAE-30 pin. So far no luck on actually getting my hands on one.