DIY: Adding SSD or HDD storage using an optical bay caddy

Introduction - This article contains details on how to make best use of an optical bay caddy to extend notebook storage with a 2.5" SSD or HDD in place of the standard or slot-loaded optical drive. Included are links to buy the correct caddy plus some configuration items: hotswapping, setting spindown timeout on secondary HDD.

Benefits of using an optical bay caddy

• Inexpensive. Ebay caddy is only US$12-US$26 delivered worldwide.
  
  
• Identical faceplate. Transplant your ODD's faceplate to an ebay Fenvi or some newmodeus caddies to achieve identical appearance to your current optical drive drive. 9.5mm ebay | 12.7mm ebay
  
  
• Improve performance and extend battery life using a hybrid SSD+HDD system. A small, fast SSD hosts your os and apps in your primary bay. A 2.5" HDD in optical bay caddy, in battery-efficient spindown mode when inactive, provides a decent sized data repository.
  
  
• 1TB/1.5TB/2TB of storage capacity using a combination of 9.5mm 500GB and 12.5mm 1TB 2.5" HDDs.
  
  
• Hotswap versatility. Allows the optical bay caddy and optical drive to be swapped in/out as required if used with a primary SSD/HDD. Eg: Can access an optical drive when needed to say load software or watch DVDs, then hotswap back in the HDD in caddy to access your repository of multimedia or document files.
  
  
• If prefer not to hotswap, can use an usb adapter/enclosure to allow either the optical drive or caddy to be used externally. Eg: PATA: 9.5mm & | 12.7mm | adapter, SATA: e-sata/usb cable or enclosure
  
  
• Use SATA drives in older PATA-only systems. Latest 250gb-per-platter SATA HDDs are faster and cheaper per GB than 160gb-per-platter IDE HDDs and are well matched to ICH2M+ 83-87MB interface speed. SATA SSD a good performer over sata-to-pata bridge as astericksed here. SATA SSD/HDD can be transplanted in newer SATA systems in the future. Older notebooks can be resurrected as fileservers or media centers, conditional on 48bit LBA bios support to allow full use of > 137GB storage.
  
  
• Can be better bang-per-buck than a system upgrade. When you consider how a primary bay SSD can provide day-and-night improvements in os and app performance improvements over a HDD.
  
  
• Can provide lower running temperature of HDDs compared to using the primary bay [user reported]
  

Optical bay caddy configuration matrix

I/O Chipset	Primary Bay	Optical Bay	Optical Bay Caddy Product Link		Example link/caddy used​
			ebay &	newmodeus<sup>0</sup>
ICH2-8M	pata or sata<sup>1</sup>[/URL]	pata<sup>2</sup><sup>3</sup>	7.0mm sata-to-pata 9.5mm pata#1 sata-to-pata#01 12.7mm pata sata-to-pata#0	- 9.5mm pata sata-to-pata 12.7mm pata sata-to-pata	HP 2510P 9.5mm sata-to-pata,pata/newm+ebay[/URL] Dell M1330 9.5mm pata [slot]/newm Dell Vostro 1400 12.7mm sata-to-pata/ebay HP 8710W 12.7mm sata-to-pata/newm Clevo M570RU 12.7mm sata-to-pata/newm
ICH9M or newer	sata	sata	9.5mm sata 12.7mm sata	9.5mm sata 9.5mm sata 12.7mm 9.5mm	Clevo P150HMA 14mm/ebay Toshiba R830-835 9.5mm/ebay-Fenvi Alienware M14x 9.5mm/ebay-Fenvi Dell E6400/E6500 9.5mm sata/ebay &newm HP 2530P 9.5mm sata/newm HP Envy14 9.5mm sata/newm Sony Vaio Z12 9.5mm sata/newm Lenovo E420 12.7mm sata/newm Sony Vaio FW51JF 12.7mm sata/ebay HP 8730W 12.7mm sata/newm Dell XPS 1647 12.7mm sata [slot]/newm Alienware M17xR2 12.7mm sata [slot]/newm

⁰ 5% discount coupons on their facebook page. Their slot-loading products the same as others linked above minus the faceplate. Their 12.7mm product allowing the use of your optical drive's faceplate as shown here.
¹ SATA SSD performs best when installed in primary SATA bay. ICH8M: CAP.ISS shows if 1.5Gbps cap applies.
² if sharing PATA bus with primary bay drive, a master/slave jumper gives more config flexibility.
³ sata-to-pata chip adds power consumption overhead. newmodeus(Sunplus)=0.8W, ebay (Marvell)=1W. The newmodeus caddy has issues with SSD TRIM - the ebay caddy doesn't. Intel ICHxM UDMA5/ATA100 PATA interface measured to give maximum read of 83-87MB/s. This post compares power consumption/performance for PATA and SATA-to-PATA caddies, benchmarks show great SSD/HDD performance.

Product Link
#0 can be modified to improve functionality: faceplate strength for hotswap ability, master pinmod, HDD LED.
#1 rear connector unscrews to reveal JAE50 like shown here.

Hotswapping the optical drive and 2.5" drive in optical bay caddy

Hotswap! provides a Safely Hotswap Hardware system tray icon to simplify disabling the device prior to removal or scanning the system when inserted. Allows hotswapping in/out the optical drive and 2.5" drive in optical bay caddy if using a primary SSD or HDD. Hotswapping is supported by the ICHxM SATA/PATA interfaces. So can for example watch a DVD with the optical drive then swap in a 2.5" HDD to access your multimedia files or documents.



Setting standby idle standby timeout to improve battery life

hdparm allows control of individual drive standby timeout periods to spindown the HDD if it's idle to conserve power. This would be recommended if running a primary bay SSD and optical bay 2.5" HDD at the same time. The commands below are easily added to a batch file to run in Windows startup folder.

• Download hdparm for Windows.
  
  
• Identify the drive you wish to operate on:
  
• Set a batch file to run in startup with standby time of your choice, example 1 min. Refer to the -S parameter in the hdparm commandline options. hdparm can also be used to set drive transfer mode, eg: 'hdparm -X udma5 /dev/sdb'
  

Versatility: using 9.5mm caddy in other 9.5mm/12.7mm optical bay systems

The newmodeus 9.5mm SATA-to-PATA/PATA caddy slides straight into a 12.7mm PATA optical drive bay. A great way of sharing data at full speed between hosts, without having to setup a network or be limited to USB speed. Can then hotswap the caddys between multiple systems. The SATA version likely to offer same versatility.

Adding a 1.8" SSD/HDD in a 2.5" drive bay

1.8-to-2.5" adapters allows a 1.8" SSD or HDD to be installed in the optical bay caddy or 2.5" primary bay. SATA adapters shown here. PATA adapter is available on ebay for a few dollars.

Quirks applicable to Sandy Bridge HP Probooks/Elitebooks using Insyde BIOS

How to enable Upgrade Bay Hard Drive boot: so can hit F9 and boot off an optical bay caddy HDD or SSD.

Quirks applicable to PATA optical drive interfaces (ICH8M or older)

1. Some system's bios sets the pata optical interface into slow UDMA2 mode. See nbruser's software and/or MBR workaround.

2. Some system's bios sets the timings to use 33Mhz rather than 66Mhz timings. Notably HP 2510P which then caps write performance to < 30MB/s. See software workaround. Consider too hardwiring the caddy Pin 34 (-CBLID) to GND to set "80-pin cable mode" which uses 66Mhz timings.

3. Phoenix bios directs boot to optical caddy HDD. See software workaround.

4. Some Toshiba systems whitelist the HDD in a sata-to-pata caddy. See here

5. May need to do a slave_mod & to get an ebay caddy running as slave. Mod works with the topda branded ebay caddy.

Followup

If using an optical bay caddy to extend system storage, please post some details as examples. Eg:

- which caddy you are using, eg: ebay or newmodeus
- the look, feel and performance of the caddy. Photos against the chassis compared to original optical drive
- any gotchas or tips and tricks
- any mods, eg: on/off switch on the sata-to-pata caddy to conserve power if using it with a SSD.

Note I have no commercial affiliation with any of vendors whose products are highlighted in this article. This information is provided to assist others in creating a great bang-per-buck storage expansion/performance upgrade.

 

Interesting.

 

Great guide - I've always been interested in using the optical bay for a hard drive, especially if I move to a smaller SSD. This way, I can keep the HDD for movies, music, etc.

 

The hotswap software is very useful, now I can switch from my 500GB HDD to my DVD drive without restarting.

 

Interesting indeed, looks like the newer ICH9 and ICH10 I would guess get full speed due to a SATA interface for the optical drive correct?

 

this is really GREAT I never thought in a thing like this. great find!

 

Confirmed to be correct with the ICH9M equipped Lenovo T400/T500. It can do full uncapped 3Gbps on their primary and optical bay SATA interfaces.

I will elaborate more on this below as it's important to know if you have a capped primary bay SATA interface to see full streaming performance with the latest SSDs capable of 220MB/s+ (OCZ Vertex, G.Skill Falcon, Intel X25-M), which are otherwise capped to ~140MB/s on a 1.5Gbps interface.

I/O Chipsets and their 1.5Gbps/3Gbps SATA interface

ICH5/6/7/8M have both a PATA and a SATA interface on the chipset, with PATA used for the optical drive and either SATA or PATA for the primary drive. Since around ICH6M the trend has been to use a SATA primary drive with the deviations like the HP 2510P and Dell D420/430 ultraportables using a 1.8" PATA primary bay interface instead.

ICH9M and newer use a SATA interface for both the primary drive and the optical bay.

ICH8M and newer are SATA-II 3Gbps transfer capable, a drawcard to upgrade from ICH5/6/7/M's 1.5Gbps maximum. You can check if your ICH8M or newer chipset is 1.5Gbps bios capped by viewing the the CAP.ISS value as shown here. If you find you are capped, the could request a bios upgrade from the system manufacturer.

 

Incredible guide, nando4, thanks for posting.

I will bookmark it for later use.

 

Is this compatible with the Nvidia 9400M chipset?

 

It should work.

 

nando4, what's your particular setup?

 

Nvidia 9400M chipset compatibility

For your NV9400m chipset, just measure how tall your optical drive is (12.7mm or 9.5mm) and look at the plug on the back of the optical drive as shown here to see if it's a SATA or PATA optical drive. Then can just follow the Optical bay caddy configuration matrix, disregarding the I/O Chipset column, to get the optical bay caddy you require.

To be pedantic with the hotswapping, would need double-checking to see what chip is handling the optical drive interface and whether it supports hotswapping. It appears the nv9400 is a SATA chip, so if the optical bay interface is SATA, it would be handling I/O and would support hotswapping.

Exceptions using additional boards on the optical drive

There are some rare systems such as the HP TX2500 that require special attention since they have an additional boards attached on the optical drive as shown here. That board requiring transplant onto the caddy instead.

Obviously hotswapping would need that same board on both the optical drive and optical drive caddy. So would need purchase of a second board to put on the back of the optical bay caddy, or the supplied board *might* be able to be affixed onto the systemboard such that the optical bay caddy/optical drive just slide onto it.

 

Please be aware that some HP notebooks with ICH8M seem to have a limitation on the optical bay connection ( maybe in the BIOS) limiting the speed of the hard drive in the optical bay to multiword DMA 2 resulting in a speed around 15 MB/s. Nando4 doesn´t really seem to accept this problem, but it is discussed in the following thread: http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?p=4955508#post4955508

Please post if you succeed to get a higher speed with a hard drive in the optical bay on any HP notebook with ICH8M and the primary hard drive on SATA. So far the problem has been described on two 8710w and one 6510b machine.

 

well, my dell m1330 is a slot loading 9.5mm dvd drive... this might be useful if i want more storage, since replacing the dvd drive means taking almost the whole machine apart... oh well, think i will stick to external hdd for now

 

I have been looking for a drive caddy for my clevo m570tu based notebook (sager 5797).
Problem is the bezel is not standard on this laptop and I want it to look good.
Went to a site where they sell drive caddies and they didnt support clevo/sager/xxodd (as of yet),
they have an universal one but I think it will look like crap..
Anyone perhaps have experience with fitting a hd in the optical bay on a m570tu based notebook?

 

For the Dell systems there's been a thread going for some time now. There's already a couple of positive reports there

http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=347870

 

Hi thnx for the reply I shouldve added a pic earlier on, sorry this is how the optical drive looks like (bezel adjusted a bit for clarity)

 

Sager 5797's optical drive looks to be a 12.7mm unit with a custom faceplate that tapers on the bottom right corner. It's a ICH9M chipset, so a 12.7mm newmodeus SATA caddy would be suitable. Though the caddy faceplate would require a dremelling workover to allow it to fit all nicely. OR the faceplate can be detached, so the caddy slides in without it, providing extra venting (??). Could also go the ebay option, but 12.7mm SATA requires a bit of legwork as explained in first post.

 

Thanks again Nando

 

If I don't want to use the original dvd drive, can I remove the internals and connect a hard drive? This is so I don't have to buy another optical bay caddy.

 

The optical drive internally has a circuit board that connects to the rotating mechanism via a proprietory thin zif-ended ribbon cable that doesn't resemble the connections on any 2.5" sata or pata drive I've ever seen. So short answer is, what you propose is not conveniently possible.

Why would you bother? An ebay optical bay caddy is $14-28US delivered. The sata-to-pata ones for ICH8M or older I/O chipsets incorporating a bridge chip to do the interface translation to allow SATA SSD or HDD to be used.

 

So the notebook would look the same with the original optical bay

 

Is there any difference in terms of compatibility between the eBay caddies (which seem to be all HP-branded) and the newmodeus ones?

 

I see that the caddy has enough room for a hard drive and a bit more. I'm wondering if there's a caddy that provides a SATA port as well as maybe a USB port?

Now that I think about it, the optical drive SATA port, in a way, is just an eSATA port, right?

 

i dont know much about optical drives so for the sager np9262 what optical drive caddy would i need for a 4th hdd? that would be great and could extend space to up to 2TB of storage!!! I think the sager np9262 will support the Panasonic UJ-220 right? Will the Sager NP9262 support hot swappable optical drives? I don't understand how this works with the previous optical drive as it doesnt have the little button at the bottom that ejects it...

 

The Macbook Pro's seem to use the ICH9M chipset, does this mean that I simply have to buy a $50 caddy, as opposed to MCE OptiBay's $100+ Expensive caddy?

Inside of a MBP there's just a slot loader, I'd imagine that if the caddy is slightly too big, I can just chop the door part off. I'm mainly worried about the thing moving around/losing connection, and having something that can give me a bit of extra room for custom mods. (GPS, FM Trans, Wireless Reciever for my Xbox, ect.)

The MBPs use a 9.5mm Drive.

 

Up to 1GB of internal storage. If install a 500GB HDD in both optical bay caddy and primary bay.

heh. should be 1TB just a minor unnoticed mistake.

 

Hm unfortunately, I think I need a 12.7mm OBHD for my G50VT, so this caddy won't work.
I'll maybe give newmodeus a shout later.
Do you know if newmodeus ships to Canada?

 

thanks... up to 2TB of storage is awesome...

EDIT: still dont understand the hotswap feature, dont you have to take apart the notebook to get to the optical drive?

 

nope. most notebooks can just plug out the optical drive without issue. the dell at work even has a huge button just for that

but obviously, for hdd's, you need to first flush all caches to disk before taking it out, or it may result in a loss of data.

 

It means you can swap between the caddy and your optical drive without the need to reboot the computer.

But yes, you'll have to clear the cache and whatnot first before you unplug it, I think that's what the red "safe to remove harddrive" icon was in the first post's taskbar.

 

Hotswapping the optical drive and 2.5" drive in optical bay caddy

Hotswap! provides a Safely Hotswap Hardware system tray icon to simplify disabling the device prior to removal or scanning the system when inserted. Allows hotswapping in/out the optical drive and 2.5" drive in optical bay caddy if using a primary SSD or HDD. Hotswapping is supported by the ICHxM SATA/PATA interfaces. So can for example watch a DVD with the optical drive then swap in a 2.5" HDD to access your multimedia files or documents.

 

Hey nando4, do you know of any stores that are located in Canada or ship to Canada?

It seems that the ebay stores are selling caddies for much cheaper. However, I haven't been able to find one that's a Generic SATA 12.5mm (as opposed to "caddy for Thinkpad T300"), are there any generic 12.5mm SATA ones in those ebay stores that I'm failing to see?

 

The ebay and newmodeus caddy vendors listed in the first post ship internationally. newmodeus charging $4US to Canada, some of the ebay caddys with free shipping included in their cost.

12.7mm SATA ebay caddy not available from my findings. Though still viable via 2 steps (1) Buy a 12.7mm caddy for it's chassis (2) buy the 9.5mm SATA caddy for it's SATA circuit board and swap it into 12.7mm chassis. Or ask notebookelite for an integrated product. Otherwise the newmodeus 12.7mm SATA caddy is the most integrated solution. Though costs $42US + delivery.

Notebookelite are the distributors of the Fenvi product and can surely make a 12.7mm SATA product by swapping the SATA-to-PATA circuit board for just a SATA circuit board. The latter simply rewiring the interface and definitely costs less to manufacture than the SATA-to-PATA one. I am baffled why they and other ebay vendors don't have a 12.7mm SATA caddy to begin with. There's plenty of MSI/Asus/Clevo/Sager gaming/performance systems equipped with 12.7mm SATA optical drives that could make use of one.

 

anyone done this with an msi laptop before?

 

For NewmodeUS, use coupon code FB072808 on checkout to get 5% off, valid until 10/28/2009

EDIT 1: July 14 - Came out to $51 CAD

EDIT 2: July 14 - Shipped within an hour of payment.

EDIT 3: July 19 - Turns out they haven't shipped yet, they just "sent the info to the shipping place"?

EDIT 4: July 22 - It's because my shipping was not tracked, silly me. It's been shipped since the week of July 14.

EDIT 5: July 28 - Arrived. Installed. Had trouble fitting it at first, but it eventually fit snuggly. Confirmed recognized by BIOS and bootable for Asus G50VT. 1.5TB storage space anyone?

 

Yes - optical drive has a sata port. e-sata/usb cables are available to make your sata optical drive function as an external unit so can plug it into an e-sata or USB port.

Using a mini pci-e socket to add an additional USB port on optical bay caddy's faceplate

The 2530P optical bay caddy faceplate has incorporated a USB port, designed to plug into a systemboard USB socket. This could be easily be adapted to other systems, though you'd likely want a matching faceplate. Maybe newmodeus can offer a custom caddy with an extra USB port??

Wiring up the extra USB port can be done easily if you're prepared to thread some wires from your mini pci-e card slot to your optical drive. The mini pci-e socket has USB pins (pin 36, 38) that you can tap off for an additional USB connection. Easiest is to use an ebay $4US mini pci-e adapter, attaching to the USB wires and lobbing off the rest. These adapters are designed for netbooks. If you are already using a mini pci-e card, could directly solder the USB port's wires onto the USB pins of that card.

[ note: you may get excited believing your notebook has SATA mini pci-e signals based on seeing flash_con as is on ASUS netbooks. This is not true. Those pins lead to sata controller on netbooks. but not for notebooks.]

 

Nah I decided to just get the newmodeus caddy after you answered me the first time, because I wanted a caddy that had SATA to SATA and USB built in.

If I wanted to solder stuff onto my comp I would've done it already.
Thanks though!

 

I'm clear with ICH9M,SATA-SATA.
But how to derminate what is mine 9.5 or 12.7 on Clevo M860TU (SAGER 8660/8662)?



Because of size, it starts as huge one, but on other side it's really thinny one.

Many thanks in advance.

 

Update newmodeus' 12.7mm sata-to-pata and 12.7mm sata optical bay caddys allow 12.7mm 2.5" HDDs to be installed. An easy way to add an extra 1TB 2.5" 12.7mm HDD to your system. Links to new products added in updated first post. Ie: newmodeus tells us:

Add a Second Hard Drive (drive size up to 12.7mm in height) to your laptop using your laptop's optical drive bay. This is a great solution for those that want to take advantage of the higher capacity 750GB and 1TB 2.5" drives! Add it as a second hard drive in the laptop in lieu of a PATA [edit: or SATA for ICH9M+] Optical drive. This device/caddy will fit in a "standard 12.7mm-high" PATA [edit: or SATA for ICH9M+] CD/DVD/Optical drive bay found in laptop computers.​

 

excellent stuff nando4, just what ive been looking for. with bootable flash/usb drives, my dvd caddy was becoming dusty
although it is a blu-ray drive, so maybe useful if i could afford to buy a blu-ray movie
+1 rep

 

For my G50VT, I just unscrewed it, slid it out and measured the height with a caliper.

Confirmed 12.7mm drives work, I have a 500GB 12.7mm in there right now.
Can you link me to the 1TB ones? I didn't know they have them.

 

WD10TEVT - 12.5mm 2.5" 1TB SATA HDD

 

Thanks again nando, I got my ocz vertex ssd today and put my 320 gb hitachi in the caddy (while running win 7 from the ssd).
It works like a charm on my notebook (xxodd/sager 5797?clevo m570tu).
Adjusting the bezel was easy and it looks really snappy

 

Thanks very much for this, such a great solution!

I'll be doing this in my XPS 16 for sure!

 

i got the newmodeus sata-pata for my acer 6920g. when i boot up, it tries to boot from the caddy hard disk (wd 250GB). if i go to the bios setup, it does not see the internal disk drive at all what am i doing wrong?
edit: hang on, i think i have to set one to slave? its a western digital, there are 4pins and a jumper covering the left 2 nearest the sata connector. anybody know which 2 to make it slave? no luck on WD site so far
edit 2: doh, thats the reduced power spinup/spread spectrum clocking ( ?????? ) so still looking for help

 

6920G=965PM chipset=ICH8M I/O chipset. So the primary bay is SATA and the optical bay is PATA. The jumperless newmodeus sata-to-pata caddy boots up as Slave. It is unusual that the primary SATA bay would not be seen at all. Worth check for bios updates to correct as well as double check the optical drive in Windows Device Manager to see if it's the primary (Master) or secondary drive (Slave).

 

@nando4: the board i have does not have the jumpers on it. bios is latest. where exactly can i see in Device Manager the primary/secondary?
CD location says location 0,channel 0, target 0, lun 0, physical dev is \dev\Ide\IdeDeviceP0T0L0-0
my hard disk is also location 0,channel 0, target 0, lun 0, \device\Ide\IdeDeviceP2T0L0-4
can i hot-plug the device after booting?

 

Your optical drive is set as master. The optical caddy is running as slave. There's your bootup problem. Suggest asking newmodeus for the jumpered master/slave REV_C board as shown in my last post.

Yes - you can hotplug the ICH8M PATA interface. Use hotswap! to do it safely by disabling the optical drive prior to swapping in the caddy. Then use it's 'Scan For Hardware Changes' to detect the caddy.

 

Can anybody has PATA type of dvd interface confirm how fast it is?