Will there be a power issue with my Sony (replacing OOD with HDD)

I'm planning on replacing my Sony's DVD Drive with a hard drive, probably the 7200rpm hybrid. I'm told that DVD drives use a "slim sata" or something that uses less power... will this be a problem for my computer?

 

Almost any modern notebook HD will use less power than a DVD drive.

The 'slim sata' probably means that it is a low profile drive, so you may have a problem if it is slimmer than 9.5mm of a standard notebook HD.

There are a new line of 'slim' drives announced recently, but I don't remember which manufacturer released it.

Good luck.

 

If you have an F series, check this out:
How to install a secondary hard drive in the optical drive bay of a VAIO_VPCF Series

It's very useful for how to swap things out. Even for different models, the process should be similar. Which Sony do you have? The Fenvi caddy is really a good design and mine works fantastically.

I did hear somewhere that it does use less power, but it would be nominally more power than an optical drive that is never used.

 

Well, if you think about it... An ODD is something that isn't in use much, if at all sometimes. If you replace that with something that as long as it has power it's spinning (unless you specify it a spindown time), you're looking at maybe 10-15 minutes off your total battery time. Depending on how hard the disk is generally being hit, of course.

 

Hard drive only take up about 3-5 watts, you should not worry about the power draw. I am sure your PSU can draw enough power, most PSU's can provide more power then its rated for a certain amount of time, but hard drive dont draw that much.

 

And you can have the drive turn off when it isn't being used.

 

How do you do that?

 

You can set hard drives to turn off after a certain amount of inactivity in the advanced power options in Windows.

 

I thought that field applied to what would be my main drive (SSD), which is recommended to set that function to "never". This same field applies to 2ndary HDD as well?

 

Thanks for all of the input guys. I have a sony vaio VPCEC and I've got a caddy picked out for it.

 

It works with all the drives, not only the C drive.

 

I guess my question is "how will that impact my SSD, or will it?".

 

I don't have an SSD, but I don't think it would be much different than a HDD. As long as the drive is accessed at least once before the time is elapsed, the timer will reset to 0 and the drive will not power down. This is done separately for each drive in the system. When any HDD is powered down, I've noticed it takes 2-3 seconds for it to spin back up and be like nothing happened.

 

Oh, I can live with that. Thanks for the explanation.

+1 when I'm able to give again.