Welcome to Boardsort™ - Learn - Sell - Profit -

I have hundreds of boards that I have collected for the last 20+ years (bottom picture) that I thought were all hard drive boards. But when I started looking up the numbers, I found that some were tape drive, floppy drive or cd rom boards; so I evidently cannot identify them by the the plug socket.

In looking many of them up by the circuit board numbers, I was able to determine that most of the hard drive ones have a kind of dotted 'footprint' or a plug like in the other photos.

Is it safe to assume that all boards that have this footprint or plug are hard drive boards, or is there another way?

Or maybe a better question should be is "how do you separate hard drive boards from CD rom and floppy drive boards?"

Most hard drives have that connection. Either the socket for pins or contact pads that relay information/power from the board to the inside of a hard drive. I don't know off the top of my head if HDDs are the only format to ever use that but most HDDs do have it.

If I have some time later tonight and nobody else answers I'll see if I can go through the rest of you're questions

_________________
Here to learn more so I can recycle more
My grades are my own opinion and not an official grade from Boardsort

Okay this is just a quick, from memory, answer to your question, hopefully it's helpful. Feel free to ask more questions.

As technology is improved things change and the older the board the more likely you are to find less standardization. Typically:

Floppy drives usually have an IDE connector, this will have 34 pins instead of 40 pins like a HDD (pre-SATA). The power connector is smaller on a floppy drive than HDD/CDROM. Floppy drives are also usually brown on one side and green on the other, but can be green on both sides. Typically have the fewest IC chips

CDROM boards with an IDE connector will have several other ports too. CDROM boards can also have a volume dial and one or several small switches. Older boards have more ICs but the newest may only have 2-3. CDROM boards without certain chips won't be able to make the CD board grade.

The number of ICs on HD boards have also been reduced over the years but generally have the most of these three types.

_________________
Here to learn more so I can recycle more
My grades are my own opinion and not an official grade from Boardsort