I’m looking for an adapter from a laptop PATA 44-pin connector to SD/MMC cards, similar to the standard ones like Amazon.com , but with a longer board and with the SD port facing “outwards”. I want to use it in a Thinkpad T23, where the HDD is accessible without opening the case, but I’d like to avoid constantly pulling out and re-inserting to the HDD connector in the machine & putting more wear on it (and eventually risking breaking it or it’s connection to the system board). Have seen some CF converters that would be accessible from outside the HDD slot, but then again CF is getting kind of expensive in larger capacities (I only have a couple 2G CF cards as it is).
Everything I’ve found thus far are shorter boards with the SD card facing sideways.
Welcome! I don’t have an answer for a longer card, but I note you can buy extender cables for sdcard: maybe with that you could get the sdcard into the position you want. Amazon search.
I have seen those, but you would have to do some extreme folding/bending to get the cable to fit within the space. And would need quite a short extender otherwise you’re jamming in a lot of extender cable into the drive bay.
As a follow-up (should have mentioned it earlier when I eventually tried it), I did end up buying the PATA/44pin to SD/MMC card, plus the shortest extender I could get, but just can’t fish the card into the drive slot to where I can get it to push into the drive connector. I’d probably have to open up the case and connect it that way.
Although for what I’m trying to run with it (MSWin98 and MSWin 2000, in order to do videos on multimedia software from a company I once worked for) I might just put in a reasonably-sized HDD and do a triple-boot (Win98, Win2K, and some very-small Linux setup to hold images for re-imaging the two MSWin partitions).