Acer Aspire 7738G: Adding SSD to second hard drive bay

Hi all,

I recently upgraded my Acer Aspire 7738G with an SSD, without replacing the 500GB HDD that was already inside. To do this, I had to do a few tricky things, but finally got the result for only a few euro's. Thought I'd share, in case anybody else would be attempting something similar

- The problem -

The acer comes with an empty second HDD bay (!) This sounds like the ideal place to house the new SSD. Moreover, there is a clear SATA connector there, which actually is properly connected to the motherboard!



However, there's a catch or two:

1) The bay "door" has a shape in such a way that it's impossible to fit a hard drive in there. (I forgot to take a picture, but this is what happens if you try to fit the 500GB hard drive from the first bay into the second bay:



As you can see, it just doesn't fit The bay won't close.

The non-cheap solution would be to try and find the acer component for the "correct shaped bay door". However, this will easily set you back with 20+ euro's, while you have a proper door already!


2) Acer's proprietary hard disk "connector" is missing. Even worse, if you try to use the one from BAY 1, it won't work! (there's a difference in mechanical model!!)

If you search online for "acer hard disk connector", you'll get a few hits of stores ready to sell you the connector for BAY 1. However, I did not readily find the one for bay 2!


- The cheap solution -

1) Quite easy, just do a bit of mechanical fixing I took a pair of scissors to to most of the work. A small pincer did the rest of the work. You can see the result here:



2) The hard drive connector:

Turn out that the mechanical difference is really minor. All that is required is some trimming at the end of the connector. So I just ordered a second HDD connector, and trimmed it. I took a picture of the difference between the two:




- Finally, fitting the SSD ! -

After all this hard work, you wan't to get the SSD working! Step one is buying the SSD



Step two: Putting it into the bay: --- SEE SECOND POST BECAUSE OF PICTURE LIMIT

-- SECOND PART BECAUSE OF PICTURE LIMIT:

Step two: Putting it into the bay:



As you can see, there's actually even some room left!



As a matter of fact, because of all the trimming, there is so much room left that you actually need something to hold the drive in place now! (The first time I forgot, and just by flipping the laptop upside down, it slid out of the connector!

Again, an easy solution is straightforward Just use a bit of bubble wrap from the shipment of the SSD



(Note that -in theory- this could suffer from heat-dissipation issues. I'm guessing it'll just be fine, but feel free to use something more appropriate)

Last but not least, proudly behold the final result!




Hope this helps somebody

PS: Just in case somebody was planning to buy the same SSD as me, remember, the aspire 7738 does not have SATA3 You'll be limited to 'only' 300 MB/s (VS the 50MB/s you had with the old one). The random-read/write benchmarks are still whoppingly impressive.

 

could you please tell which adaptor did you buy?

 

I'm happy that I'm not the only man who whant to do the same.
But I want to cut the cover. So I search all over the world to find it, and I think this is the good adapter : http://www.birminghamitnow.co.uk/laptop-parts.html?page=shop.product_details&flypage=flypage-ask.tpl&product_id=1118&category_id=15

You can find many result in google or ebay with this key words : caddy hdd, hdd connector..

 

Hi guys,
I'm also the owner of this laptop and so I decided to add SSD too. It's now plugged into the motherboard but I cannot see the disk in the system (Windows 8.1). Do you have any idea where could be the problem?

Thanks!

 

In the system? Where exactly did you look for it?
Have you checked in BIOS?

 

So I too did the mod/upgrade you described, but my laptop doesn't see the SSD. I have checked everywhere to try to discover it, but it doesn't show up. Any ideas?