Question: I’ve gotten my hands on a seriously cheap laptop grade 2.5 inch drive. I’m intending to use one on a desktop that doesn’t have 2.5 inch bays as a boot drive. While I know there are adapters available, I know its fairly common with SSDs to simply velcro/tape the drive somewhere. I’m wondering if I can do the same with a laptop hard drive.
One issue I see here is SSDs are fairly insensitive to vibration, while hard drives are. Just how vibration sensitive are drives? Would a jerry rigged mount need to take this into account?
Answer: Laptop drives are generally more vibration-resistant than desktop drives (they are designed to be used in a moving plane, car, in a laptop on someone’s laps, etc.), so from this standpoint there shouldn’t be a problem taping them somewhere inside your computer’s case. There are other problems, however:
When hard drive is fastened properly, metal bracket also acts as a heatsink. Moreover, in a properly designed case there should be an airflow around a hard drive. Your tape will have lower thermal conductivity than metal, and depending where you tape it, there could be less airflow available. So your hard drive could overheat.
Constant vibration (from hard drive’s motor, computer’s fans, etc.) can loosen the tape over time, depending what kind of a tape you use, it can dry up, etc. So don’t put your hard drive vertically somewhere, make sure it’s fairly secure without the tape, and use the tape as an additional measure, not as something that prevents your hard drive from falling down on your motherboard, for example.
Make sure you don’t short anything on hard drive’s PCB, if it is exposed (e.g. there are no protruding screw heads on the surface that you tape your hard drive to).
I’ve used tape to secure 2.5″ hard drives in a desktop tapes, but only temporarily (till I got around to order a few of those conversion brackets).