HowTo: Latitude E-/Precision M-Series Second 2,5" HDD

They also have a caddy for the E4200, E4300, M6400, and maybe a couple others. That's likely what his picture is of. Yes, I just ended a sentence with a preposition.

 

Yeah that's what I thought. So, I'll repeat my request in a more specific way:

Does anyone with an E6400, E6500, M2400 or M4400 have the newmodeUS caddy? If yes, could you post some pictures? Thanks!

 

not yet but I plan on ordering some for our E6400's after seeing the one for the E4300. I guess they left the latch mechanism out for the E4300.

 

Here is a picture of my E6400 with the newmodeUS caddy. Apologies for the quality, I took it with my Blackberry bold (which you clearly shouldn't buy for the camera) and I don't have a better camera with me. My impression of the newmodeUS kit is that it fits my E6400 as if it were Dell original equipment.

 

OK, thanks! It does look great. And since y'all say it works great too, well, I guess I'll buy it (not right now... but soon).

Thanks again!

 

Just read through the entire thread. I am about to get my e6400 replacing the internal with a OCZ vertex, I am planning on taking the stock 7200 rpm and putting it in the cdrom bay. Question through, for people who have done this already, are you seeing a noticeable drain on your battery? How much time will this setup cut from the overall battery time without the second HD in the cdrom bay.

 

i think your battery drains will be minimal make sure to set the second hard drive to idle when not in use , im guessing youd be using it more like a backup / media drive , therefore you would want to have it set to spin down within 1 min of inactivity or whatever suits you best

thing is you would be best going to the likes of the ocz forums for tips on how to disable all uneeded disk read and writes because you can set your drives to idle at whatever u want but because of windows and its indexing and pagefile and numerous other services and proccesses the drives never really get a chance to spin down because of this

 

The SSD has a lower power consumption than the HDD (see Tom's Hardware charts). Whether or not the HDD actually powers down remains to be seen, but it should spend more of its time on idle. You may well find that the combination does not reduce battery time.

John

 

Can you post some links to the products you purchased? I assume they are:

HDD Caddy - $45.95
HDD 500gig - $89.99
eSATA adapter - $21.95
eSATA enclosure - $xx

Is that that same / similar optical drive cable?
And are you using the external caddy for a HDD or the optical drive that was removed?

I'd like to keep my optical drive and be able to use it if I need to install something from CD. I don't think I would need to bring the optical drive with me anywhere, so I think I could just use the eSATA adapter I linked to. It says the eSATA adapter is for a HDD, but I'm pretty sure it would work fine for the optical drive. Also, if I brought the optical drive with me when I traveled I would like to have an enclosure for it so I'm interested what you are using your enclosure for (and a link to it if you are using the enclosure for the optical drive).

 

I ended up ordering the three parts listed in my above message. I figured I probably won't need the external enclosure for the optical drive. If I ever need to install anything while I'm traveling I can do it via other means. (eg. transfer to flash drive).