Hi guys
In the past i have used the small drives from an external harddrive case just open it up and there are sata connections on the end of the drive.
Today i had 2tb drive (external) that I opened up wanting to use it in my desktop but the sata connections are not there only a series of about 5 pins and then a space and then 2 pins. Is there any way to convert this for a Desktop
Thanks
Rick

you mean the USB pins? can you take a picture?

As you can see in the pic the USB plug is attached to the board with some additional pins

Yes, however it does not make much sense to do so and it is not an easy conversion. Furthermore the drive is not designed for SATA use.
Wipe and sell it and buy yourself 1-3 brand new SATA drives.

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Hard Disk Drive (HDD), Solid State Drive (SSD, SATA, NVMe, etc), USB Flash Drive and RAID Data Recovery Specialist in Massachusetts

Thanks I might just do that but since Im an inquisitive kind of person can you give me a little info on what those pins are. If the HD manufacture is going to make a USB drive and put a USB plug on the board what have all those extra pins
Rick

The extra pins could for easy programming at the factory, serial ports, testing etc. Drives like this can have 2 different boards, a USB board, like you have, and a SATA board. When recovering these drives, a person doing DR might opt to find a compatible SATA board, and transfer ROM or whatever to make it work.

I dont think you will find it all that interesting to be honest

Thanks
I have had a few external drives that are up to 1/2 TB when I opened them they were all like you say on SATA boards I could just plug them into my desktop. Does the size of the drives have anything to do with how they are building them now.
Rick

Has nothing to do with size, rather with costs. They are saving money by using this design by basically removing an extra adapter/converter from SATA to USB interface from the production line.

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Hard Disk Drive (HDD), Solid State Drive (SSD, SATA, NVMe, etc), USB Flash Drive and RAID Data Recovery Specialist in Massachusetts

Thanks Guys
Looks like I came to the right place
Have a good weekend

@trickyrick, if you are truly inquisitive, then determine how each of the pins connects to the MCU, and locate the ground and supply pins. Then we might be able to find out something useful.

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A backup a day keeps DR away.