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

Be adventurous and do it with a roll of duct tape, a straw, and a paper clip. LOL

 

wow you beat me.
man i wish i could build connectors out of paperclips and straws. maybe i should get on that!

 

Hey, I'm crafty and good with my hands, but not THAT crafty. LOL

Was just reminiscing about McGuyver.

 

This is strange, just received my Fenvi SATA caddy and it does fit my Acer ODD slot but the SATA connector is slightly a bit tilted 1 mm and I can't push the drive fully in. If i try to force the pins to bend i might break something, i'm thinking of opening my laptop and try to manually fit the SATA ports. Anyone got this problem before?

 

I've got the older design 9.5mm sata-to-pata caddy. When I disassembled it there I found a screw was holding the interconnect circuitboard in place. That screw could be undone and circuit board moved slightly to cater for variances in the JAE50 connector it attaches to.

I'd advise you disassemble the Fenvi caddy and see if the circuitboard can be moved to cater to your system.

 

thanks for the tip I will return with the results.

 

For SATA-SATA users:
There is a much more cost effective solution!

Today I used only an extension cable and external power supply to connect a sata drive. It worked perfectly.
Serial SATA Male to Female Extension Cable mainboard - eBay (item 250686679908 end time Oct-21-10 23:26:38 PDT)

 

Hello,

I have an Acer 4920 and I'd like to move my HDD to the optical bay and install a small SSD in the normal drive bay. I've checked and it appears the optical drive is IDE and so I'd need one of these Fenvi IDE-SATA caddies.

Has anyone successfully installed any 2ND drive on any similar generation Acer notebook? I'm wondering if the BIOS has support for HDD via IDE? It seems some have posted here with problems.

I'd like to be more certain it can work before ordering a caddy.

Thanks!

 

So how exactly does this cable + external power supply fit inside the notebook for portable use?

 

i got my caddy today, but when i installed it it worked perfectly for a while then i tried to use CDM and i got a write error.
i then tried to access the directories and i got this error:
0x8007048f device not connected
i tried to run the windows error-checking tool and it didnt seem to work.
the hdd is visible in both bios and windows but is basically useless.
tested the hdd on an external enclosure and it worked fine.
any ideas?

 

@Carmaniac,

I've got a Vaio S series, and I want to do the same thing, so i'd be really interested to see what you've done as well! Any pics you've got would be awesome and some links to the caddy you bought as well

Thanks!

 

Ok I've watched a video on how to do this but I'm still unsure as to what caddy I should buy for my computer.

I have a sony vaio vpcec.

 

2nd Drive Caddy for Sony VAIO E & F Series (add 2nd HDD or SSD) [OBHD-SATA12-SATA-BU] - $44.75 : NewmodeUS, Hard Drive Caddys for Notebooks

Will this fit? >_>

 

Easiest way to find out is to take out the drive.
Determine the height (9.5 or 12.7 mm) and the connection.

From there go to the first post and pick what you need.

 

Ok I'll get on that ASAP. Thanks.

 

I pulled the drive out... not sure how to tell these things.

 

From what I can tell it's sata. Do I just measure the height? from where to where?

 

From the bottom to the top.


Remember, you're trying to see if it's closer to 9.5mm or 12.7mm - that should help from the 'where to where'.

 

Ah lol I feel very silly. It's my first time taking apart a computer so I apologize for being a bit frantic!

2nd Drive Caddy for Sony VAIO E & F Series (add 2nd HDD or SSD) [OBHD-SATA12-SATA-BU] - $44.75 : NewmodeUS, Hard Drive Caddys for Notebooks

Won't this work with both 12.7 and 9.5?


Edit: And I can confirm it is in fact SATA.

 

From the link you provided. You should be good to go.

Good luck.

 

Awesome lol now to wait until December when prices go down =p but I'm happy to know othat I can not start saving for these things.

 

wrapped around the drive and with USB

 

@all, we finally have some pics of the swappable faceplate on the 9.5mm Fenvi caddy. See:

http://forum.notebookreview.com/sony/469244-z11-replace-dvd-hdd-working-solution-18.html#post6869886

 

After studying the internals of the ODD laptop slot (my laptop is an Asus G60JX), it seems there are a couple of internal clips that might break when pushing the caddy (the last 2 clips will fall in between the HDD and the caddy edge and prevent ejecting the caddy later, possibly the first ones too). Please see the attached image.

So the question is, is there any SATA caddy that has an HDD cover plate?

In the image the first inner 2 clips will fall between the HDD and the edges of the caddy.

Thanks!

 

I do understand you have your reservations, but this is frankly *bs*.
The caddy will not have any 'clips' going outside or inside, maybe some some of clamp holding the disk which will be perfectly safe.

 

I'm not sure your concerns are necessary. The HDD caddies are designed to be the same size and shape as the optical drive itself. If there is a
"clip" that you think will come between the HDD and the caddy, that same clip would have been obstructive to the ODD itself (if I understand your concern correctly).

The holes that the red lines/circles are pointing to are the screw holes through which you'll secure the HDD to the caddy. The top of the screw will be on the outside of the caddy, but is flush enough to not be obstructive to its insertion or removal.

Let me know if I'm understanding your problem.

 

Here's some good pics of the 12.7mm ebay "Fenvi" caddy with swappable faceplate. There should be no clips that get in the way as the chassis of the optical bay caddy matches that of an optical drive perfectly.

 

I managed to work this out. It works just fine. Also exchanged the old faceplate

2 questions.


1. why hdparm won't save the standby timer for the drive? Isn't -S a flag for Power Management feature in the drive? It should save this setting.

2. using APM will conserve better power than using -S flag in hdparm? I keep APM off, AAM at 208 (Seagate ST9500420AS recommendation). I tried to set Power management in HDDScan but it won't pass the setting to the drive (standby timer feature of the drive). I believe it's an sata issue because the SMART reporting is also trashed.

Anyway, i made am batch that passes hdparm -S and -y at start. But i believe APM or PM can solve this the easy way with no extra programs at startup?

 

Can you use a hard drive smaller than 1TB? I have a 500Gb that came with the laptop and want to use that.....

 

Are you asking if you can use a hard drive with a capacity smaller than 1 TB in the ODD caddy? Yes, you can. You can use any size hard drive that (physically) fits in the caddy.

 

Thats what I thought. Just wanted to make sure before buying. Thanks.

 

I've been looking all over the place for an answer to this but to no avail. Has anyone successfully added HDD storage using an optical bay caddy on a notebook which already has 2 HDDs installed using built-in HDD bays?

I want to try adding a 3rd (third) hard disk drive to my Alienware M17 using the optical bay. No raid setup, just 1 HDD as system and 2 setup as slave for storage. Also discussing on the Alienware M17 thread.

Alienware support said power shouldn't be an issue but they aren't sure about bios issues of running 3 hdds.

 

If the optical drive is SATA then there shouldnt be a problem.

 

yes there are people here who have done that.

Ill do it someday too with my system

 

Thanks for the responses. It's just that in the following thread, how someone mentioned that he had issues with the notebook not posting without the optical:
http://forum.notebookreview.com/asus/480211-asus-laptop-g50vt-x5-raid-0-3-hard-drives-possible.html

Alienware Rep said there shouldn't be any issues about the notebook posting without an ODD. I will also have a USB one to hand if necessary anyway.

Also, elsewhere, I've seen people postulating whether or not the m17'S bios is able to recognise 3 hdds or not. The issue was never resolved.
http://forum.notebookreview.com/alienware/389946-smart-bay-m17-m17x.html

This is how my dvd drive is removed:
Replacing optical drive in M17

I was going to use this device:
Optical Bay Hard Drive Caddy (OBHD-SATA12-SATA-BU) Univ, 12.7mm [OBHD-SATA12-SATA-BU] - $44.75 : NewmodeUS, Hard Drive Caddys for Notebooks

although mine looks more like this one (and has a price more like that)
Caddy on ebay like mine

I've definitely confirmed that my current ODD uses a SATA connection and is 12.7mm in height.

Anyone see any reason why I shouldn't go ahead and order the parts? Also, I'm using a modded OCZ bios rather than the alienware bios, so if anything, it should be more compatible I would have thought.


Found someone with a dell m6500 running 3 HDDs using the optical HDD caddy:
http://forum.notebookreview.com/del...-precision-m6500-three-hdds-without-raid.html

Someone referencing 3 hdds in the Alienware M17x:
http://forum.notebookreview.com/sag...hy-dell-aw-claiming-faster-2.html#post3016445
Although I'm not sure if he's speculating or speaking from experience

Someone with 3 HDDs on a g50v:
http://forum.notebookreview.com/asus/402268-should-i-raid-0-my-g50v-2.html#post5158815

 

There shouldn't be a problem at all. The new HDD will just replace the ODD entry/slot in your system. The issues in the other threads appear to be a quirky BIOS in the G50 that won't let it boot without an optical drive (which is quite odd), and the fact that most of the others wish to run RAID with their optical bay drive. Running RAID gets tricky because unless you're trying to run software RAID, most notebooks lack the hardware/firmware to RAID drives.

 

Thanks mate, I appreciate the info and reassurance. I've gone an ordered the caddy which should take a while since it ships from Hong Kong. Next up is the 1tb WD Scorpio Blue for the caddy and deciding between a 3.5" 1.5tb WD Caviar Green or new 3.5" 1tb WD Caviar Black for backups (via my hot swap external caddy via esata)

I already own one 1TB caviar black and am more focused on reliability than anything else (though I need 1tb minimum to backup the new notebook drive). I've been scouring the net for info about this and will post the outcome later with reasons in case anyone else researches something similar in future. If anyone has any advice on this, feel free to chime in.

So far I figure that the Caviar Black series with a 5 yr warranty must be the more reliable one. Especially as I'll only be using it once a fortnight for backups rather than everyday use.

 

How important is your data?

Never trust your data to just one 'backup' - ever.

I recommend you purchase two drives (different makes is better) to do identical backups to.

A five year warranty means nothing if it goes up in smoke one day.

 

This is true, I often tell my Dad to do the same for his backups of the computers at his workplace.

At the moment most the info I have on this notebook is backed up over various external drives, often twice. Having another 1TB drive is just for ease of backing up new cds I'm backing up as flacs. Redoing my entire collection again too since last time I ripped them as 320kb/s mp3s. I've since bought a DAC, desktop headphone amp, decent fullsized headphones so want to have it all in lossless to appreciate it fully.

The way I see it for my situation, I am making a backup of the (soon to be) 3 notebook drives (mainly music) using the 1tb drive in the esata external caddy. Unlikely that all 3 drives AND the 1tb would fail, especially considering I don't have a raid setup and my notebook never leaves the bedroom.

Hopefully if there's a price drop in a few months I will invest in another drive to cover the eventuality of one or more of the notebook drives and the external drive failing simultaneously.

The 5 yr warranty is more a sign that WD have more faith in those drives than me wanting to use it. After all 5 years is a long time in the world of computing.

Ordered all the disks now, so I'll hopefully have some good news to report once it all arrives so there's a record on the internet of someone successfully installing 3 HDDs on the M17 in case anyone else is in a similar situation.

 

Hi,
I have a very old IBM Thinkpad T42p and the optical drive is 9.5mm and IDE/PATA interface.

I am thinking of putting in a SATA HDD into a suitable caddy so that I can use a SATA HDD rather than the PATA HDD. I'm thinking of booting up from the caddy instead of the PATA HDD. I'm looking at a new SATA 750MB or 1TB HDD.

Can someone advise me what ebay caddy is suitable?
Thanks in advance.

I found the below:

IBM Thinkpad T42 Ultrabay Slim SATA 2nd HDD Caddy DV04 - eBay (item 250680958618 end time Dec-08-10 19:33:55 PST)

SATA 2nd HDD Caddy drive Adapter for thinkpad T42P T43P - eBay (item 170421341494 end time Dec-12-10 07:34:40 PST)

SATA 2nd HDD caddy for IBM T40 T41 T41p T42 T43 T60 - Laptop Parts & Accessories > 2nd HDD Drive caddy > IBM

 

NewmodeUS, Hard Drive Caddys for Notebooks

Try there.

 

I posted in this old thread ( http://forum.notebookreview.com/lenovo-ibm/405473-x301-t400s-what-size-hard-drive-3.html)

Basically I want to totally remove the included 1.8" and run primary (boot) on the caddy 2.5", is that possible?

 

Hi,
Thanks for the reply.
I checked out the website but the caddy only takes PATA HDD. I am looking for one that takes SATA HDD. I emailed them to ask if they have something that takes SATA.

TP-2SB Slim Ultrabay Hard Drive Caddy for IBM Lenovo Notebooks 62P4554 IBM Ultrabay Slim hard disk drive adapter [TP-2SB] - $27.95 : NewmodeUS, Hard Drive Caddys for Notebooks

I wonder if there are any generics that can fit my needs.

 

somewhere in this forum is a thread about a ide to sata adapter.

 

Check this link:
http://www.newmodeus.com/pics/OBHD/OBHD-Matrix-6.html

Scroll down and you can see various models which use SATA interface HDDs and have a PATA type connector at the back. Hopefully this helps...


My DIY project continued
So I've received my 2.5" 1tb hdd which I want to try and put into the ODD caddy once that arrives from Hong Kong, lol.

Quick question, is there any reason why I can't format the HDD using an external caddy, transfer a whole load of files and still install it next week and set it as active etc from 'Computer Management' without any complications?

Sorry if it seems like a silly question, I've just never had to activate a HDD using 'Computer Management' which wasn't a brand new HDD which shows up as 'RAW' unallocated volume in 'Computer Management' which I would then format, set as active, assign a drive letter etc.

Update, I went ahead and put it in the external caddy. So far I've just assigned a drive letter and set up the file structure thing (I think you have 2 options for it in Windows, with one only needed for disks greater than 2tb).

I had problems formating it using 'Computer Management' so I'm running diagnostics on it using HD Tune. However I won't transfer any files till it's all complete. In the meantime, if anyone can advise if it's ok for me to put files onto it using an external caddy and then install it internally using the ODD Caddy without any problems, I'd appreciate it.

Many thanks

 

Hi guys (ill_i_bus, Marecki_clf, stamar)

Thanks for replying my previous questions.

I got replies from newmodeUS that they got no caddy that meet my needs:

1. TP-2SB Slim Ultrabay Hard Drive Caddy for IBM Lenovo Notebooks 62P4554 IBM Ultrabay Slim hard disk drive adapter [TP-2SB] - $27.95 : NewmodeUS, Hard Drive Caddys for Notebooks
"Sorry, we only offer the PATA version."

2. "The T42 has a specialized bay. Unfortunatley, our generic caddy (OBHD9-SATA-B) won't fit in there."

Anyone has any suggestions on what I can do?

Thanks in advance.

 

There's quite a few T42 sata-to-pata ODD caddies on ebay. The cheapest being US$16-delivered.

 

Does the Newmodeus 12.7mm caddy work with the G50v(t) laptop?
3 hard drives for the win!

 

Probably it will.
newmode is a ripoff however imho.
Refer to opening post for more reasonably priced alternatives.
Don't be put off by chinese sellers - they do deliver.

 

Is there a way of having the caddy so it is hot swappable? i.e. can just plug in when need to connect a hard drive without powering down?