First post, by SanguineBrah
I recently picked up a Toshiba Tecra 510CDT for pretty cheap but most of these things had the hard drive caddy tossed before sale, presumably in the name of data security, and mine is no exception. Those of you that have tried to find one of these caddys, with its unusual connector bridging the standard 44 pin IDE to the laptop, will know that they are about as rare as hen's teeth.
Everywhere I looked, people described this connector as 'proprietary' and unobtainable, with one person even doing the unenviable job of individually soldering dozens of tiny wires to make the connection. However, after a bit of patient digging, I have found that these connectors are not obsolete or unobtainable at all - they are in fact still in production by 3M today as their "Pak 50" series.
The part I picked up was P50LE-050P1-R1-DA, which isn't perfectly suited for the job because an extended section of plastic on the left and right get in the way but after dremelling the sides down, it mates perfectly. I then whipped up a very basic autorouted pcb to translate it to a standard 44 pin IDE header, which I'm currently waiting to receive from the fab so I will update with more details if/when I manage to get that working. The pin out is in the service manual, so it was pretty straightforward and should work fine.
I hope this helps a few other people to get these things up and running again.