compatibile caddy for SSD

hi guy, i bought a very cheap, Dell ESATA capable external media bay

New Dell Latitude E-Media Bay External E-Sata Drive Housing CP110 | eBay

i wanted to use this as an external, yet bootable SSD drive (a 128GB crucial) for running/ experementing with SteamOS/ and what-nots

can you guys advise (with links) of any caddy that i can use within this bay to achieve that

I have the M17xR4, and this bay will most likely stay in my computer drawer

 

Return it. That bay is meant to house E-series Optical Drives only. And I could not find an E-series to 2.5" converter drive caddy. There are many other eSATA hard drive caddys out there. You just need to find one that will accept notebook drives (2.5") as well.

 

On second thought, you may want to do with something like this:

StarTech SATDOCKU3SEF Plastic 2.5" & 3.5" Black SATA II USB3.0 & eSATA SuperSpeed USB 3.0 eSATA Hard Drive Docking Station with Cooling Fan - Newegg.com

At least get a dock that will sit on your desk. One that has a fan is even better so the drive does not overheat, which it is guaranteed to do if it operates within your desk drawer.

 

Oh no......sugar.......it looks so good and well built, I am sure there must be a Chinese equivalent bay adaptor for the thing.

I already have desktop device for 3.5" hdd, and I live in Australia so no newegg for me, I will try to find something compatible, or the fine folks here may have some further ideas

 

This should help explain things further.

http://forum.notebookreview.com/del...y-compatibility-between-different-models.html

AFAIK, the E-Series use 9.5mm tall optical drives as opposed to the more standard 12.5mm tall drives. Interface wise, the E-series external media bay can hook up to any eSATA port and run the drive it's connected to no problem. BUT...fitting an optical drive into it is a challenge unto itself as you would need a slim line (9.5mm tall) optical drive or hard drive caddy. All optical-to-hard drive caddys I've been able to find are 12.5mm tall. Here is one I've found that may be 9.5mm tall. You can always email the seller and see if it will work.

Amazon.com: 2ND HDD HARD DRIVE caddy for Dell E series E6400 E6500 2ND HDD HARD DRIVE caddy for Dell E series E6400 E6500 M2400, M4400 M6400: Computers & Accessories

The other issue is the External media bay you got is the first version (there are two versions of the external media bay). Version one is meant be compatible with the E-series by plugging into the E/Dock Docking Station for power.

 

So i need a 9.5mm high caddy am I correct?
So are you saying the powered estata won't work on this gen of enclosure with my m17r4?

I really want this enclosure to be able to connect a SSD to my computer that is truly bootable suffers no bandwidth issues as USB do, and be an experimental drive to install other OS on,

 

Correct, you will need to find an optical to hard drive caddy that is 9.5mm high.

You can do any eSATA enclosure. All of them are pretty much pass thru so the only limitation is what speed the eSATA port will run at on your R4. Most likely it will be SATA 2.

The only compatibility issue I can see with the E-series external media is with the power out. I couldn't see from the photos others posted if the power out on the media bay is a standard SATA power port or some sort of weird proprietary deal of Dell's. Post a photo of the backside and I will get a better idea of what you can do with this external media bay. If its possible to use it with a third party power plug, would you be willing to do it? Of course the catch-22 is you will need to find an optical to hard drive caddy that is 9.5mm tall instead of the 12.5mm tall ones.

 

Hi there I finally posted the back of the dell external media bay


I would prefer not wanting more cables. all this exercise has been done with one purpose in mind to avoid more cables and provide an external native SATA driven hdd/ssd

 

If you are dead-set on external storage, your options are USB 3.0 or eSATA. Any USB 3.0 or eSATA dock / enclosure will work. And of course, they will all connect to your computer through a cable of some sort. If you choose eSATA, you will need an additional cable to provide power to that drive, since standard default implementations of eSATA will not provide power.


Your other option is to just unscrew the bottom panel of your laptop, and swap internal storage devices as wanted. I would actually recommend you do this if your goal is to experiment / play with OS'es, for multiple reasons:

1) No loss of speed due to interface.

2) You can do this today. No additional hardware to buy or to wait for arrival.

3) If you go pure external storage for experimental OS deployments, you want to remove your internal storage drive anyway. OS installs are not elegant processes. As some examples that I know about, Windows 7 will put its boot partition info on the "first" drive (usually the internal drive, if multiple drives are installed). SteamOS' first public beta installed on the "first" drive, without any confirmation dialog that it's about to wipe that drive. If you go with USB, you may run into driver issues if the OS install process doesn't pre-load the correct USB controller drives.

Again, these are just examples that I know about. When you start doing OS installs (especially multiple installs of experimental OS'es that you intend to repeatedly wipe and reinstall), you're taking a risk of wiping the contents of any other drive connected to your system. This is why it is recommended that when doing OS installs, you disconnect every other drive from your system that will NOT contain part of the OS until after the OS has been fully installed. And if you're doing that, you might as well just skip the whole external storage idea and just use the internal drive bay.

 

I'm with you on not wanting to have to hassle with more cables than absolutely necessary. Is this the only port on the back of the External media bay? That only looks like the one for the SATA data, unless it's a combo SATA data/power port.

Could you take two more photos? One of the inside of the external media bay (you may have to lift up the front cover to get a good shot of the inside connectors and such). The idea is if we know exactly what it looks like on the inside, we can see if there's a possibility of using several adapters to make an optical to hard drive caddy work for it. Second photo would be of any cables which came with the external media bay.

 

Pictures In required order

 

I believe the thicker end of the cable is able to supply power as denoted by the USB icon above the esata on the media bay, and the included cable is meant to be used as such, luckily the esata on the 17 is a combo esata USB port

 

That would be my best estimate too.

The external media bay seems to run off of eSATAp, and your R4 does support that. And the inside of the bay is what appears to be a slimline SATA. Also a plus (as its not some weird proprietary connector...you never know with Dell). :thumbsup:

So the real issue is you will need to find an optical to hard drive caddy that's slimline SATA (very easy as most all of them are Slimline SATA) but also 9.5mm tall, not 12.7mm.

Doing a quick search, this is one I found: 2.5" SATA to SATA HDD / SSD Caddy for 9.5mm Optical Drive - Free Shipping - DealExtreme

The specs say it will fit a 9.5mm optical bay, but you should contact them and confirm it before you buy. And keep searching. Good news is once you find a caddy, it will all just be plug and play.

 

Well I got the caddy sent through by a Chinese eBay store,after a few weeks, got it installed and lo and behold works as intended (1 month ago) however now I need the advice for installation of steamOs, particularly when I use a USB stick to install the latest beta, how can I make sure that it installs on the esata drive. I have 3X SSDs in the laptop (msata and 2x 2.5") and none of them are RAID'd, one runs win8, another only win7 and the third (evo 1tb) as a redundant drive for games and storage

 

Not sure how SteamOS installs. If it's anything like Windows, you can't see the actually drive type, only which drives have formatted partitions and which ones don't.

 

unix-like/linux installations vary from similar (e.g. ubuntu, mint, manjaro) to highly dissimilar (e.g. arch). i think i remember hearing that steamOS has a GUI installer now.

are you familiar with GNU/linux's drive naming convention, i.e. /dev/sda, sdb, sdc for physical disks -- /dev/sda1, sda2, sda3, etc. for the respective drive partitions? you should be able to identify the disk you want to install it to by executing...

Code:

lsblk

...in the shell. or through the GUI installer if that actually exists of course.

 

Well I can see and to a certain degree identify the drives in the GUI (using the 960mb installer on a USB stick install) however there are concerns mentioned on the official site, that it can install something like a starting partition on the 1st drive and or will format any drive in the system, now the issue is I have 3 ssd's in the system 2 of which are easily accessible however the third (msata) is buried deep in the laptop (m17r4) and it was nerve wracking to install it in the first place ergo it can't be removed. Any advice ?

Sorry to reignite the old debate, but can anyone give me some advice regarding the above quoted message