Crap, sorry for the wrong link! I meant http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B004FD5BNE/ this. The advantage of using an mSATA SSD here is that there is no space concern: it just fits.

But, looking on eBay I found SATA female - 44 pin PATA male converters for a few dollars but I have no idea whether a disk equipped with such a converter would fit in the normal hard disk space. It's probably a hit-and-miss for any given laptop as the SATA plug and the converter PCB eats up a few millimeters -- perhaps removing the casing of the SATA drive helps and then pad it with foam once in place. If I would need to do this I would start with this, making sure I know how to return the SSD should it not fit. Especially with the casing need to be removed, I would research the warranty policies well before going down this road. If it doesn't fit, you would need to throw away the SATA-PATA converter you got from eBay but that's again just a few dollars.

As for used SSD and that utility: SSD disks interpret the Secure Erase ATA command as "this cell is no longer in use", making performance as it was when it was new. Apparently you can use Parted Magic http://howto.cnet.com/8301-11310_39-...-an-ssd-drive/ as well -- however, I have NFI whether a converter would pass the Secure Erase over to the SSD (supposedly it should) and so it's much easier if the original owner does this. Because the Secure Erase procedure was chosen a password needs to be set -- just to be removed by Secure Erase itself. Welcome to the PC world where the keyboard controller chip is sometimes used to switch modes on the main CPU, the Secure Erase is used to reset SSDs and so on.