eSATA on the G73 via spare HD bay

I can't recommend this, but I needed eSATA. I also need 1394, but that's a different story.

I am absolutely not responsible for any damage this may cause to your system or disks. If you do this incorrectly you can harm your internal drive. Even if you want to do this, read the entire post and think twice, because it's pretty silly. It negatively affects the portability of your machine, since there's a cable hanging out of it.

This involves cutting a plastic connector, so you will need a dremel or a serrated blade and some patience. This ugly hack wouldn't be required if there were inexpensive adapters for this purpose but I haven't found them.

THIS DOES NOT SUPPORT HOTPLUG. The drive must be powered on and connected before the computer is powered up. If there is a connection problem at any point, the entire controller will get confused and you will need to power down immediately, losing any unsaved data, and possibly hosing your filesystems. The external disk cannot be removed without powering down. This also means that a loss of power to the enclosure or any kind of malfunction will make your system lock up.

Update: hotplugging works for me now on Linux. I discovered this after I updated my kernel from 2.6.37-rc1 to rc5. Technically SATA should hotplug in almost any scenario, but I only tried it once before writing this guide and it crashed, so I added the above warning. I'm not sure if it works on windows because I don't run it.

Required materials:
2 male to male SATA adapters
1 eSATA to SATA cable
1 SATA cable

Should run you about $25 with shipping.

Start off by mangling the first SATA adapter, the border around the connector needs to be shaved or cut off. On the adapter I got (BYTECC SATA-180MM), the sheath comes off. Pull the sheath away from the body of the adapter and cut the sides away. Be careful cutting the plastic because it is brittle and cracks easily. Leave just the middle L shaped connector:



Trim one side as shown so that it will fit snugly in the spare drive bay (the right side in these pics). Again, leave the L shaped connector completely intact, only trim the right edge of the plastic housing as shown. Leave the left side intact or there won't be anything to hold it in place. Make sure to trim the correct side based on these pictures:







Put the sheath back onto the adapter, being careful not to bend the wires (make sure it's oriented the right way -- look at the second adapter for reference). Next, open the access panel and make sure it actually fits on the drive bay's SATA connector. If it fits, take it off of the drive bay's connector, and plug the normal SATA cable onto it. Snake the cable around inside the bay and plug it in, but be extremely careful not to connect it at a bad angle where the connector is strained. This is the most important part - angling the cable so that nothing is hurt, but it still fits. Make sure your connector is flush and well seated so that you don't experience disconnects. Then tape it down well with electrical tape, so that it doesn't move:



Put the access panel back on, but don't screw it down:



Take the second male-male adapter and connect it to the SATA cable, then connect the SATA to eSATA cable:



Position the cable under the front of the laptop, and plug it into your eSATA enclosure:



Power up the drive and then power on your computer. Press ESC at boot until you get the boot options menu, and verify that the drive shows up. If not, power off and check the enclosure and the connections.

 

Interesting, if not crazy. I wonder why you can't do PnP/hotplugging with this; if you convert the dvd drive into an hdd optibay, it is hotswappable.

Are you getting full esata speeds, at least? And, wouldn't it just be simpler to try and convert the dvd drive into an esata bay?

 

Because it's wired to a regular SATA port. The HM55 chipset provides an eSATA port but it's not used for the optical bay.

The real question is why didn't Asus just add an eSATA port to the case....they could have squeezed it in somewhere for not much extra cost in manufacturing

 

Thanks for the info, I have always wondered how to go about getting this done. Now all I need is courage and a little bit of luck

 

The optical bay is more of a full enclosure, I'm not sure about hotplugging it since I've never owned one, so I can't tell you exactly how that would work, but it's probably got its own board to handle that.

I do get full SATA speeds -- it's just routing the cable outside the case, it's an internal drive as far as the computer is concerned, that's why the controller flips out if you disconnect it.

Right, but I knew what I was buying when I bought it.. it was cheap enough anyway, I just needed the adapters which are a few bucks each. Hopefully ASUS gets back to including eSATA/1394/ExpressCard on their gaming machines. Maybe if they look at their competition they will change their mind, since pretty much every other brand has them, but I'm not terribly optimistic.

I changed a couple of the pics in the post to try and make it clearer where to chop up the adapter.

 

I know you knew that. I wasn't replying to you

Cool project though! Done it on desktops but never a notebook.

 

Great Job! I was hearing about this but finally someone did it!