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

hi,
does anybody know this caddy? can i use my 2.5" ssd with it and run my operating system with it?
do i need any other "stuff" to get it work?
Special design 2nd hard drive caddy for HP 2530P 2540P | eBay

 

I need some help.
I bought a noname caddy off dealextreme and stuck it in my laptop (HP 8510p). It detects fine. No glitches. I even learned how to set to UDMA5 mode, no problem.
What I can't get a grasp of is this:
This HDD (160GB Hitachi) was the original drive in my laptop. I've since replaced it with a 500GB Seagate and kept in a 3,5" external enclosure. That was becoming a bit of a hassle to carry around and I thought I'd try this caddy thing.
The HDD works fine for 1-5 smaller (<1MB) files, but when I try to transfer a bigger file, it hangs for a bit, then drops the connection. It actually goes off the charts. The computer does not recognize it anywhere. I can bring it back by scanning for plug and play devices in the device manager. The HDD still works fine in the external enclosure, but on the caddy (SATA-to-PATA) it fails everytime.
The optical drive works, so the interface/mobo is not the problem. Could it be a faulty caddy? How would I test for this?

Please help.

PDK

 

It could be faulty caddy.. most likely.. where did you buy it?

mine works very stable (I have 1TB WD Scorpio Blue 12.5mm) if set to UDMA6 (transfer speeds maximum - 59mb/sec), caddy was ordered from newmodeus.com.

or it might be drive resetting it to mdma2, still it's weird, HDD shouldn't disappear.

did you do a trick with BarEdit / setpci to make it udma5/udma6 ?

 

Thanks for the swift reply!
I've been googling for solutions for two straight afternoons...
Yes I've tried baredit and hdparm (no setpci yet) and the result is still the same.
When set on udma5 the drive feels snappier for the first few moments of usage. And then it drops.
I ordered my caddy off DealExtreme. I'm not trying to solve the slow transfer speeds yet. I just want to make it work first.
It goes like this, I drag and drop (or copy-paste) a large (100MB) file onto the drive and the transfer speeds up, like it was doing 45MBps and then right before the end stops and goes on for quite some time, only to make the harddrive disappear. The file does not get copied.
Any suggestions?

 

If you do not apply baredit's hack - is behavior the same?

I suspect BIOS resets drive to mdma2 mode. Drive should auto-appear actually. What's the BIOS version you have on 8510p ? Did you install SATA AHCI driver as well in Win7 ? (it's probably has nothing to do with caddy, but still).

 

It was like this before I applied anything. That's what got me searching for solutions in the first place. Silly me, I thought this would be plug and play...

The BIOS version is the last one released. I believe it's F15. I think I did install the drivers.
I can try installing them again and checking for any progress.
Will report back.

 

BEWARE: do not update your bios to F.20 or you may not rollback it (HP introduced RSA encryption in the latest bioses).

I'm on 8710p using F.0E bios patched with SLIC2.1 and whitelist removed - caddy works fine, but as I said earlier I ordered from newmodeus, so yours might be just broken.

 

I've no intention on updating and I don't believe there even is a new bios out for my laptop (it's ooold).

Anyhow, I ran a live linux distro - Slax - off of a USB key and guess what: I could copy the files between the sata and pata/sata(caddy) drive and between the two partitions I have set up on the pata/sata drive with no problems whatsoever.
So it seems the fault lies with Windows.
I reinstalled the Sata AHCI drivers provided by HP. Tried copying three ~200MB files between the two partitions. I got much further, but after about 50MB of the first file there was an unspecified error and I had to skip copying and then the drive disappeared.
So it's definitely Windows' fault.
Any suggestions?
I do have a reformat planned (and it's very necessary) but I'd like to wait for Win

 

Great news! Yes, most likely it's a windows issue.

Did you install a Windows bundled with some drivers or anything? You need to use original OEM iso package (better grab it off microsoft.com).

As for the bios, well, there is patched BIOS for 8510/8710 laptops which will give you an ability to activate your windows legally without using any 3rd party cracks etc (SLIC 2.1 + certificate + SLP), that's why I mentioned if you need to use this better not to upgrade to the recent bios.

I guess it has nothing to do with BIOS settings as well if your drive works fine in Linux. Must be an issue with Windows system.

Good luck and report back. Thanks.

 

i have actually acquired the license thru the dreamspark program MS has for students. so i would say the they are as original and vanilla as can be. have installed a ton of other programs and some of them might have messed something up. my past experiences with windows were that it was absolutely necessary to format my system after a year of normal usage.
i'm planning on gettin win8 licence thru dreamspark, but i'worried that it won't be available on october 26th....i don't know if it's worth formatting just because of the caddy., it annoys me to a great level that it's not working but setting the whole system up from scratchagain might be a bigger pain.
i would install a rtm version of the web and later just replace the serial with a proper one but i read that MS is once again making it harder to...you know
i might read into that bios thing...

 

if so it's weird.. might be 3rd party driver causing this?

also I have a question.. do you have 3d drive guard turned on? you might try disabling it in the device manager.

hope that helps.

about OEM activation:

don't think anything will be changed - it's a very very good method of activating windows offline for vendors of hardware.

 

OK I need help with my Dell N5110 laptop.

I purchased this from newmodeus and installed a HDD without any problem: 2nd HDD Caddy for DELL Inspiron 15R (N5010, N5110, M5010, 7520) [OBHD-SATA12-SATA-BU] - $44.75 : NewmodeUS, Hard Drive Caddys for Notebooks

I also have a SSD on the sata port of my laptop.

What I want is to be able to boot from the device I choose: either from SSD or HDD. However, i couldn't do that even though I choose CD/DVD as the primary booting device from the bios. It always boots from SSD.

Any help?

My specs: intel i7, hm67 chipset, latest a10 bios.

 

don't think you can do this, unless your bios allows you to do this.

alternatively you can install alternative bootloader (grub2 or grub4dos or acronis) or use standard windows bootloader (just alter boot.ini or use BCD tool for WinVista / Win7 systems) on your primary hard drive and setup a boot entry for 2nd HDD.

don't forget to mark 2nd hdd as bootable when you partition it.

 

well, I didn't want to use easy bcd or a similar program. I guess I have no choice. Thanks anyway.

 

it might be a 3rd party driver..
i'll try turning 3d drive guard off, it never crossed my mind that that could be the cause.
even so, i'm considering the issue half solved, since i've determined that the caddy isn't faulty and that the drive works ok.
thanks a million!!
i'll think about formatting and report if the issue was solved by it - or just the 3d drive guard.

 

I have read most of this thread but could find an answer to my question.

I have a Sony VAIO S series 13" with a slot loading optical drive. What caddy would be sutable for that configuration? Can I buy a standard one and remove the faceplate?

Thank you for your help!

 

First you need to check what's the interface of your Optical Drive (SATA or PATA).

2nd is to determine is it 9.5mm or 12.5mm

for 9.5mm SATA you can use (probably) this:

9.5mm 2nd SATA HDD Caddy for Sony Vaio VPCSB3S9E/B replace UJ-862A UJ8A2AS UJ862 | eBay

 

Anyone do a conversion on their Alienware m15x or m17x? I just did, and everything is working, but for the life of me, I cannot find a front bezel for the optical drive online. Apparently macrecycling.com has gone out of business. And all the other generic slot-load bezels just don't look right in their display photos.

 

I have no clue whatsoever what is wrong with my laptop.
The caddy and the drive worked fine on a fresh install of Windows 8 and after a few reboots I got the same issues as I had on Windows 7. The drive in the caddy just...windows treats it like it has stopped completely, but I can hear it spinning. It can't even complete a chkdsk. I'm completely stumped.
The drive is ok, I know that, because if I put it in an external enclosure it works like it should.
Is it possible that I'm seeing this because of a 64 bit OS? Should I try a 32 bit one? (I've had driver trouble with x64 before)

BTW, 3D drive guard had no effect whatsoever.

Any more suggestions? Please?

 

Did you try disabling standby time for the drive in a caddy?

You can also do this via hdparm.

It's weird because as you've said earlier in Linux it worked fine.

Don't think it's a 64bit issue. I'm on 64bit Windows and it works just fine.

Did you install all latest drivers for windows 7 x64 from HP.com site? (especially the one for SATA controller)?

'After few reboots' you mean after installing updates?

Well, I'm not sure about Windows 8, maybe you need to test also on Windows 7 x64 Ultimate OEM fresh install (re-format) ?

 

I don't think standby time is an issue. this happens within minutes after boot. Also, on a fresh installation of Win8 it worked even after the laptop was left idling for some time.
I've installed nothing, except foobar2000 and firefox. And no updates. Besides, I don't think that MS is rolling out updates for Win8 just yet. Just plain old reboots. I set the drive letters the way I like, I set up firefox and foobar. Nothing else.
I know it's weird. It worked fine in slax and it worked fine on a fresh install of Win8 (honestly, I'm pretty sure I will see the same effect in Win7)
I'm booting Win8 as a backup/testing system, so reformatting won't be a problem.
Most of the latest drivers on hp.com for my laptop date back to 2009. So yeah, I'm sure I have the "latest" versions. Would it be sensible to seek drivers on the manufacturers websites?

EDIT: Ever weirder:
I can copy files off of the drive no problem (Win8). But trying to copy the same file (a ~300MB MP4) back, no way. Freezes in an instant. This has to do something with drivers... I'll try safe mode. It might be a shot in the dark though...

 

I saw a bit like this behavior but on external USB enclosure (for 2.5" IDE drives) and Windows 7 was resetting the drive or hanging (support said it could be issue with the power, but I didn't try yet connecting both ports to my laptop).

On the other side I connected device to the linux (too) and it worked there just fine

Maybe it's time for considering to move to Linux ?

No idea, you really need to try with a different caddy I guess. All my drivers on caddy from newmodeus installed from HP.com on Win7 except videocard driver (NVidia) and wireless driver (Intel).

 

Safe mode didn't help.

I can't have linux. Inventor or Autocad or Creo or Photoshop or Lightroom don't work in it. And I need those.
And I like windows. Except for the fact they sometimes start acting up over the smallest little things.

What do you mean "All my drivers on caddy from newmodeus installed from HP.com on Win7 except videocard driver (NVidia) and wireless driver (Intel)." ?
Which drivers did you install for the caddy? (I installed none, windows found it on it's own.)

 

Sorry, I only meant the fact that I've used all drivers from hp.com except wireless and videocard for the laptop with caddy (where Windows 7 lives).

Ofc, there is no driver for caddy. The only driver which correlates with caddy is an Intel AHCI SATA Controller.

 

Interesting thing: I can read from the disk fine in windows. Even chkdsk runs without a glitch if I skip the /f switch. When I tried writing, that's when things went bad.

I'm trying a fresh Windows 7 x64 install tonight. Just have to DL the install disc from DreamSpark...

Will report back.

 

I have a hp 8510w laptop(ich8m south bridge) and replaced my HDD with a SSD.
Now I wanted to replace the pata optical bay with my sata hdd and bought an Ebay drive caddy.
When al my componets arrived I did my new SSD in the drive caddy and cloned my windows installation with clonezilla to the SSD
No problems so far, but when I treid to start up my windows again it got stuck at the windows flag.
Without the drive caddy inserted windows started normally (from the ssd).
Then I made a Ubuntu live usb stick and could start it without any problems, with gparted I removed the partitons of my old HDD(that was in the pata drive caddy).
Restarted my laptop and now windows started normally again, but when I treid to make a NTFS partition in windows it gets stuck loading VDS and 3th party tools also fail.
To test if there are any hardware problems I no installed Unbuntu from the live stick no the hdd that was in te drive caddy.
It intalled without any errors, but I cannot boot from is(my bios doesn't recognize the hdd).
When I pluged the HDD into another pc the installed ubuntu started without problems.
Remarkably windows started fine with the hdd caddy when ubuntu was installed(just as with the unformated drive), but when there is a NTFS partition or when I try to make one windows gets stuck.

Thus in Ubuntu de caddy works just fine, but not in Windows 7 Enterprise with the latest Intel drivers installed.

Can anybody help me with this?

 

1) What kind of caddy you've used for 8510w? (where you ordered it)
2) If caddy works in Ubuntu it should work in Windows
3) You can't boot from the caddy directly because BIOS treats caddy like a CD-ROM device instead of HDD device, if you really want you need to use 3rd party tools like grub2 or alter windows loader.
4) After you booted into the windows did you see caddy in the device manager?
5) what gives you command

Code:

hdparm -i /dev/sdX

where X is either a or b, depends in which order your windows detects drives.
6) I'd suggest re-installing windows completely, better use OEM official ISO.

I have myself hp 8710p and it works just fine with my special hack to improve 2nd caddy speeds. The only thing I experience is 30 sec boot delay on the BIOS (it's ether caddy fault or HP bios).

NOTE: I ordered caddy from newmodeus.com

 

1) I have an ebay caddy with the marvel controller(same as the one of the led mod)
3) Booting form the caddy HDD isn't necessary, I just want extra storage space.
4) In windows the HDD shows up in the device manager and I'm able to seed drive specs and S.M.A.R.T. data.
If I do a read test with Aida 64 the reports a read speed of only 3MB/s
5) When I do the command "hdparm -i /dev/sdc" i have to wait af minute or so and then hdparm reports HDIO_GET_IDENTITY faild: Input/Output error and de drive disappears(also in device manager)
6) I have Windows 7 Enterprise on my laptop from the installation image of my university, otherwise I don't have a leagel windows and miss a lot of school related software.
Maybe I try a it later with a different 2.5 drive(not availble at the moment).

Edit:
Tried to launch the windows setup form my usb stick, but when the caddy is inserted it also fails to start. So I think even a fresh windows installation won't help
My POST also takes much longer then usaual when the caddy is present.

 

Looks like the problem lies in your caddy.

Did you try to make it master (there is an instruction in the head of this thread).

As the last resort you can order caddy from newmodeus.com (it costed me with delivery around ~45$) it's proven to work on 8710p should work on 8510p / 8510w.

here is a link for 9.5mm for HP: Optical Bay Hard Drive Caddy (OBHD9-SATA-B), Black, 9.5mm [OBHD9-SATA-B] - $42.00 : NewmodeUS, Hard Drive Caddys for Notebooks

 

It was master first(right?) and have forced in slave mod with the described mod on this forum, bud didn't noticed any difference.
Ubuntu and clonezilla work both fine, but windows 7 just crashes.
Strange is that in windows the hdd activity led is constant on when the hdd caddy is inserted.

 

hmm, it could be something with the power of the drive.

did you turn off all energy saving?

you can do it with hdparm with:

Code:

hdparm -B 255 /dev/sdc

 

doesn't help, hdparm gives the same error: HDIO_GET_IDENTITY faild: Input/Output error
In my device manager I have Intel Ultra ATA, SATA AHCI controller(running with intel driver) and ATA channel 0(where the caddy is on) with standard windows driver.
The intel chipset drivers doesn't have a driver for it, is this normal?

 

mmm, not really sure what you meant here.

well, SATA only used for primary drive in the hdd bay.

The standard PCI IDE controller used for CD-ROM or 2nd Caddy.
Yes, it should be standard.

You can try also speed improvement hack, maybe after it your hard drive will start working not sure.

also try deleting all devices from IDE controllers, windows should re-install them automatically.

 

I have the exact same problem. Linux works fine, a fresh install of Win8 rtm worked fine (it stopped working later on) and on a fresh install of Win7 it didn't work at all.
The light stays on, the drivers are hp for sata and standard for ata... Every single thing is the same.

This seems to have proven my suspicion that ICH8M HPs just won't take a sata to pata caddy...

 

I hope Windows 8 will solve the problem, going to wait for it. Have wasted already to much time trying to get my pata to sata caddy to work in Windows 7.
thx for your help nbruser, I will report my results on the forum when I have Windows 8 installed.

 

Very weird because I have Windows 7 SP1 x64 Ultimate working just fine with my caddy.

Did you guys try to install all updates btw on Win7?

 

My windows are legit and I have every single update installed. Also, the windows were installed from an oem image downloaded from MS's DreamSpark site.
Honestly, I don't think you'll be able to solve your issues with windows 8. Although there are rtm images floating arond the web and I'd love to hear your results... you could try it as a second system...


Sent from my GT-P6800 using Tapatalk 2

 

I don't think it's just a Windows problem, but a combination of my HP BIOS (that set the pata port to 33mhz and udma 2 mode to save energy).
Ubuntu uses the grub boatloader that can changes the IDE controllers settings(you have to add it manualy).
For open source distros like Ubuntu there is a lot of support for after market solutions like my ebay caddy work, this isn't always the case for Windows.

 

So you're saying in Ubuntu you've got drive working @ UDMA6 ?

I didn't test myself will be interesting to check this.

I use a hack to set drive to UDMA6, but even on MDMA2 it works fine, speed is just limited to 15 mb/sec.

 

Sorry for my wrong assumptions, should not have said that before checking it
Ubuntu support up to UDMA5 for the caddy and default it's in UDMA2 mode.

 

It also depends on your hard drive. I have 1 Tb WD Scorpio Blue it supports UDMA6 as well.

Are you sure it's UDMA2 not MDMA2?

 

Yes, hdparm had a * at the UDMA2 option, but it showed that MDMA2 was also supported

 

I got ICH4M and my read speed is 99 MB/s, but write speed is only 24 MB/s. By default Baredit shows 00001011 for 0x54. What should be there ?

 

I think it's fine, write speed could be related to HDD.

Your drive seems to work in SATA I though.

You can also try altering this value to 1033, but don't think it'd help.

 

What ? This disk is capable of running up to 280 MB/s read speed and 250 MB/s write speed, so hitting 100 MB/s on ICH4R shouldn't be a problem.

 

you gotta be kidding

I had laptop on ICH4M, there is no SATA interface at all. Only IDE. It's a very old chipset from 2003 for laptops.

And if you're using SATA->PATA caddy don't expect speeds more than 100 mb/sec (it's limited by chipset I think, even if you have your drive working @ UDMA6).

http://www.intel.com/content/dam/doc/datasheet/82801dbm-i-o-controller-hub-4-mobile-datasheet.pdf

Overall, it's not a good idea to put high speed SSD into PATA caddy, you probably need to upgrade your laptop to get SATA II speeds at least from your SSD.

 

I know, but why write speed is so slow. It didn't speed up after forcing udma6. While read speed jumped from 31 MB/s to 99 MB/s.

 

The answer is simple, most of the SSD's are not working quite good on old hardware especially on SATA-I interface converted into PATA...

Better get proper hardware..

 

Guide moved HERE

 

Who can help me modify BIOS Acer 5553g for working with double HDD? When I connect second hdd (using caddy), laptop freezes at bios POST checks, no errors, but when it should boot up Operating System nothing happens. As normally it shows Press F2 to enter setup. If I press it, laptop reacts, shows entering setup and again - nothing happens. I can`t even enter bios setup!!.