HHD question on replacing EIDE with a SATA.

At the moment this is a bit hypothetical. I have a 9.5yr old Acer laptop that has its original 120Gb drive fitted. The drive says on it 'Enhanced IDE'.

The Crucial website says that the original storage fitted has 'Serial ATA support' and suggests a standard SATA SSD as a replacement.

My question is whether you can just fit a modern SATA drive as a straight swap here. Not necessarily the Crucial one as I've seen some good offers on Samsung SSD's, and in any case I wouldn't want to spend much on such an old PC.

If i'm not mistaking this is possible but only with a eide to sata converter.
But i'm not sure it would fit your laptop, most converters have a PCB plate that is pretty wide.

You can get IDE SSDs on ebay. I myself have just ordered one for my 1998 Mitac 5033 but as your picture shows that drive's connector is IDE/PATA. As the other poster mentioned you would need a PATA to SATA convertor, and space may be a problem as you are fitting a PCB with two connectors on it to do the conversion.

Thanks for the replies folks. The earlier pictures are of the actual drive in question and I must admit, I thought I would need some kind of adapter (or a similar EIDE replacement).

This was why I was puzzled because this is the drive Crucial say would be a guaranteed fit (just a standard modern SSD). I'll do a bit more investigating.
Crucial BX200 240GB SATA 2.5 7mm (with 9.5mm adapter) Internal SSD, CT240BX200SSD1 from Crucial.com

It is guaranteed to fit because it is the same size, other than thickness, which it's adapter will take care of. You need to worry about the connection, which is not compatible. At some point, you reach the time where it is best to recycle the old equipment and move on. I personally wouldn't put any money into upgrading that old of a system...but would rather put the money towards a new laptop. Laptop prices are very good these days.

DeaconFrost said:

It is guaranteed to fit because it is the same size, other than thickness, which it's adapter will take care of. You need to worry about the connection, which is not compatible. At some point, you reach the time where it is best to recycle the old equipment and move on. I personally wouldn't put any money into upgrading that old of a system...but would rather put the money towards a new laptop. Laptop prices are very good these days.

I replaced a SATA HDD with a SATA SSD in an HP Pavilion g6 Notebook using a Crucial 120GB SSD. It fit perfectly using the included spacer to ensure the SSD didn't move around. It's running Linux Mint 17.3 on 8GB RAM just fine, only moving parts are the fan and the ODD when in use.

As mentioned there's seldom, if ever, sufficient room in a Notebook to adapt a PATA drive to a SATA drive.

Well the laptop in question is coming up for 10 yrs old (but its happily running W10 32 bit). Can't really disagree with anything you all say... yes, its not worth spending much, although I would have splashed out £30 for a 120Gb SSD (which is what I can get a new Samsung drive for). Its only used as a 'second' PC these days, I have an up to date Dell laptop with SSD for daily use.

So the general consensus is that an off the shelf SATA SSD isn't going to fit, but better to ask than to have got something unsuitable :)

Thanks all. I shall mark this resolved.