Disclaimer. ToughbookCentral.com is not responsible for any potential damage to your equipment. Follow instructions below at your own risk.

We have used Western Digital ATA-6 250 and 320GB hard drives (WD2500BEVE, WD3200BEVE). Other ATA-6 drives should be compatible as well.

Bend pins 41 and 44.

Important! Make sure this hole is not covered!

Put some thermal grease on CPU

And keyboard heatsink

Now it’s possible to upgrade hard drive without clipping pins. So you still be able to insert the drive in an external case or other laptop later if you want to.

Cover the first three pins of the HDD connector with electrostatic tape (see picture). After replacing the cable, make sure there is no connection between pin 41 and the mainboard. Now it’s possible to use any 5 volt 2,5 inch ATA-6 HDD and still be able to use the disk in an external case if operating system fails.

Via: http://www.leog.net

Toughbook W2 HHD cable modification.

The Panasonic Toughbook models CF-Y2/W2/T2 and CF-Y4/W4/T4  (Mark1) are a 3.3.Volt notebooks and as such NOT compatible with standard 5 Volt notebook hard drives. 3.3 Volt version of HDDs are only available via OEM suppliers, but most modern drives seem to be internally compatible with 3.3Volt usage and can be made to run on 3.3Volt by clipping two power supply pins. This recipe is from the Japanese CF-R3 site.

It has been tested on the CF-R2 using a Hitachi 80GB drive and now by myself on the CF-W2 and T2 using a Western Digital Scorpio ATA-6 120GB drives (WD1200BEVE 120GB 5400 RPM 8MB Cache), both times replacing the original Toshiba MK4025GASL.

WARNING: By clipping the pins you make the new harddrives incompatible for
normal 5Volt usage. You will probably loose your warranty and may damage your
notebook. You should make a backup of your data before starting!

Replacement Description

Other HHD models reported to be compatible:

• Fujitsu MHV2120AH 120 GB, 5200rpm 8mb cache