The components are parts that are only meant to fit together one way, and if you have to force it, you're doing it wrong.
I just had a very old memory come back to me that is very relevant to this comment and FC's situation, so it's story time again. There is the axiom that the above is always true except when it isn't. It's a
lot less common now, but back in the ribbon cable days (which IDE still harkened to), it could sometimes be easy to attach the cable upside down, especially with cheap cables and connectors. Normally this isn't a big deal at all, except for...
The
2.5" 44-pin IDE connector. Inside laptops, the drive would clearly only fit one way, but with external adapters with cheap connectors that don't block the orientation key pin (pin 20) on the 44-pin IDE end, it's theoretically possible to plug it in
upside down. With any other ribbon cable interface with a drive, this matters not and will simply result in the system typically not booting until it is powered back off and the cable is plugged in the right side up. However, you'll note that the big difference (outside of pin count and pin spacing size) between the 2.5" IDE and the
40 pin desktop IDE connector are those extra four pins - pins 41-44, which carry power to the laptop drive. Now, pin 1 always sits next to the jumper pins on these 2.5" IDE drives, so, looking from the back with the circuit board down, it would be on the right, but after the four jumper pins. This is usually marked on the drive itself.
Anyway, I was working a bench job many,
many moons ago, and this place had a brand new to the bench and unused for us at the time cheap 44-pin IDE to 40-pin IDE plus 4-pin molex power adapters (
much like this one), and pin 20 wasn't blocked which let it be plugged in all higgledy-piggledy (much like the same linked example). I also had a tech at the bench with us who was the living embodiment of Murphy's Law. This guy nearly ran a drill bit through his fingers one time trying to drill out a stripped screw on a hard drive to do "data recovery" in another computer when all he had to do was boot the current system from a live CD and transfer the data without even cracking the case.
You can probably see where this is going. Laptop hard drive, ribbon connector carrying power that could be plugged in upside down (or even connected to the jumper pins), skilled $10/hour bench jockey, important data recovery and backup job. Well, our technical friend "Murphy" gets to work on this job. A few minutes later, I'm in the back and I hear a loud
POP followed by an "oops" and the faint aroma of
magic blue smoke being released. Murphy, one of our A+ Certified "professionals", fried both the drive and the adapter by plugging the drive in upside down. We had to hunt down another drive of the same make and model to replace the board before we could finally do data extraction.
My point is... um... oh right! FC, if the pictures are accurate on what you bought from Amazon that Sparafusile recommended, you should be fine (it looks like pin 20 is blocked on the smaller connector)... but pay attention to which pin is pin 1 on both the hard drive and the adapter anyway. Worst case, reading the instructions will probably be sufficient. If in doubt, check. Otherwise, it should just fit one way. Just don't connect it to the power and USB until you're sure it will only connect that one way. :)
Thus ends the story, and the lesson. Good luck!
Maybe someday I'll have to share the one about the field tech and a backward PCI network card. Some of the trench stories from over the years that I could tell are both horrifying and spectacular.