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

This thing is a nightmare. I bought this to fit into my E4300

I bought one that looks exactly like the one in the first post. It works but not without a slew of problems.

First off I was supplied with 4 screwed to screw into the HDD so that will work with some kind of mechanism to hold the HDD in place in the caddy. However the grooves of one of the screw wore off while I was screwing it in and now it can't be unscrewed out.

Then the connector between the HDD and the caddy is so tight. I had to angle it in a certain way to get it in, and with much force. Plus the screw which grooves had worn off gave me quite a bit of a problem. I'm lucky I'm doing this on a WD Scropio Black and not my 200 dollar SSD.

Then I tried to plug this into my E4300. It was a little tight, not too bad. However I don't know what kind of mechanism there is in the E4300, one I put slide it in half way easily, it can't slide out all the way. There is some thing holding it back and I've to use quite a bit of force to yank it out. When it goes about 80% in, there is another of this mechanism. And once it goes all the way it, it's really tight and I doubt it can ever fall off even though it lacks the bracket for the locking screw.

I don't thing this thing can ever come out of my E4300 and I really hope it works damn well.

 

Would this work? However, it might draw power through the eSATA/USB combo port so you would need to use the USB power connector.

John

 

I actually ordered some optical/USB enclosures off of ebay to try. Unfortunately they are being shipped from Hong Kong so I have no idea when I'll actually see them.

fatedquest: If you purchased the caddy for the E4300, it should have come with a wire loop thing that you can use to pull the caddy out. The E4300 doesn't have a spring loaded latch like the 6400 and 6500, it uses a screw under the cover to hold the drive in. Use the wire loop to pull the caddy out, or I've also used a large regular screwdriver as well. I haven't ever screwed my drive into the caddy, and it doesn't flop around much if at all.

 

I ordered my caddy from some guy in Hong Kong through ebay.

I didn't purchase a caddy for the E4300, I purchased a lenovo caddy, the exact same one on the first page.

There is no wire loop to pull the caddy out, but there is some groove to pull it out, however it is not stuck pretty tight in my laptop and I can't pull it out. I probably have to use a screwdriver to push it out the same way I pushed out the DVD drive with the bracket.

The E4300 doesn't have a spring loaded latch, that's right/ But it really does have some mechanism that is holding the thing in place. I'm not talking about the tight fit or the connectors. After I slid the caddy halfway in, it was still pretty lose and way definitely not in the connector yet, but when I try to slid it out, it goes smoothly until a certain point where it gets stuck. I have to yank it out hard to pass that point. There is an audible click when I pass the point back in again. There are two of those points, it's not possible to not realize it.

Although I'm not happy at all that a screw is now permanently lodged in my HDD and the caddy is stuck in my laptop, the performance is pretty good, I'm getting the full speed of my HDD, so I shall just hope nothing goes wrong until I'm ready to trash this lappy altogether.

I'm also disappointed that the BIOS has no dual OS option. It just treats both the HDDs as "internal HDD". So I'm now trying to figure out how to set up a triple boot between Windows 7 on the primary HDD, Windows 7 on the secondary HDD and Mac OS X on the secondary HDD.

I would really appreciate any help. Thanks =)

 

The key is in the boot.ini file which you can edit using the boot tab in msconfig.

Here's some relevant info.

John

 

you must have a different caddy then I bought, mine slides in and out just fine once the connectors are separated.

 

this post can be removed

 

I have recently gotten an M4500, and am planning to add an additional drive using a media bay adapter (not certain whether it will be NewModeus, or the stuff available on eBay).

My goal is to use the SSD for running a database, and make sure that is fast as possible. I'll have the VM for the database running off the SSD, so that all that activity is fast. At this point, I'm really not so worried about the speed of my Windows7 disk.

I've read some places that were talking about having to change bios settings, and such. Is this something that I"m going to be concerned with?

Is there any reason I should change my plans on putting the SSD as my secondary disk?

Thanks--

 

I've got some initial information from setting up my drive, and wanted to know if it seems like I've done things right.

I received the drive yesterday, along with the adapter to install the SSD into the optical media bay.

When I booted the system, and looked at the BIOS settings, the SATA configuration was already set to raid-on (which I believe is one of the settings that I've seen recommended here) Since the BIOS was already set to one of the settings that I believe should enable TRIM, then I shutdown, and inserted my Intel drive into the system. The system booted without a problem, and all I had to do was to go into Computer -> Manage -> Storage -> Disk Management to get a partition on the drive and get it formatted. From there, things seem to be doing great.

I downloaded HD Tune to test the performance of my new SSD (is there somethine else that anyone else would recommend). My stock disk was reporting 30 - 50 reads /sec and an average of 22.1 ms seek time. The new Intel SSD is reporting 3500-3800 reads/sec for small reads (512 B or 4K), and 236 reads/sec on 1MB reads-- with an average seem time of 0.3 ms.

Does it seem like I've got everything done correctly?

Are there other testing tools that I should look at?? (HD Tune was just one of the first I came across in a Google search for 'Disk performance testing').

Thanks--

 

ATTO and CrystalDiskMark are often used for SSD performance because they measure and report performance for difference block sizes.

John