I've been reading this forum for a while and decided to create an account because of something weird I remembered from a few years ago.

I tried to temporarily swap a failed optical drive in a laptop (an HP Pavilion ze1210) with a known good drive from another laptop and discovered that the connectors were slightly different. The working drive (from a Gateway Solo 2500) made a loose fit in the connector on the HP and wasn't detected reliably. The opposite was true as well - the HP's drive would only partially plug into the connector in the Gateway. The specs I could find for the two drives listed the same connector part number, and I don't think it's likely that Hirose changed the connector dimensions between 1999 and 2002 without changing the part number. Neither laptop uses a caddy or adapter of any kind, so I didn't forget to swap that over. Has anyone here seen this?