Anyone know if Lenovo will dump the 12.7mm bay on T430?

As title suggests, anyone know if Lenovo will do away with the 12.7mm ultrabay slot and return to the normal 9.5mm bay in the next iteration of the T4x0?

As it stands, there are no official 12.7mm ultrabay HDD caddies, no official travel bezels to cover up that cavern if one opts to yank out the optical drive (which seems to shoot open whenever you so much as look at it)...

Good grief, what were they thinking by making such a big hole in this machine for an optical drive? If they played it smart, they could have made room for a slot-load optical drive AND a 7mm hdd caddy... Heck, that would make most sense and really make the T420 into a killer machine with 3 full-time storage bays and an optical drive to boot.

Either way, I just don't understand why Lenovo didn't continue on with a normal 9.5mm bay...

 

Two thoughts about why they opted for the 12.7mm bay.

1. Perhaps they didn't like depending on a single source of 9.5mm Blu-ray drives. However, Blu-ray also needs an FHD display to work properly and watching Blu-ray movies isn't usually a high priority for business customers.

2. When the design was being prepared the highest capacity 2.5" HDDs were 12.7mm thick and perhaps they wanted to have the ability to use them.

IMO it would make more sense to stick to the standard 9.5mm UltraBay form factor including the option for the bay battery.

John

 

How did that work out for them? How many of those $1100 blu-ray drives did they sell?

 

Businesses who order top of the line machines, probably bought out quite a few. For us personal users, aftermarket BD-RE can be found under $200.

 

1080p Blu-ray rips look quite nice on my X220i.

If they've already made the switch, it seems unlikely that they'd go back. Using a drive that no one else does is usually more expensive.

 

Doesn't 1080p video need a screen with at least 1080 vertical pixels to show in full, otherwise it'll just simply be downscaled to a lower resolution (making it no different from a video with the lower resolution)?

 

Ya I agree and hence the question ... Any word out in the wild whether Lenovo will retain the T420 12.7mm bay in the next iteration (T430)? ... or will they (hopefully) dump that form factor and go back to a normal 9.5mm size?

If they keep 12.7mm, why doesn't Lenovo offer a proper 12.7mm HDD caddy, or a travel bezel? The ones recommended on the site are all 9.5mm, which doesn't make any sense at all.

Like I mentioned before, it would make more sense replacing the 12.7mm with a slot load optical drive and leave room for one more HDD slot below/above it - even if it would only be 7mm... with the proliferation of SSDs, it shouldn't be much of a problem for consumers to get the drive they require.

Sometimes I wonder about Lenovo..

 

I'm not aware of any ODM/OEM that is doing this? I would like more storage options as well... but this may be a little extreme.

 

12.7 mm drive is cheaper, and it is in the interest of Lenovo and the enterprise customers to retain similar parts for their machines to decrease parts inventory need.

i.e. having a single keyboard to fit all machines from X to W series.
having a single docking design for all dockable machines.

 

12.7mm drives are less costly than 9.5mm? Really?

 

By today's standard the cost of these 9.5 mm and 12.7 mm drive should be pretty much on par. But the biggest benefit of the 12.7 mm drive is the fact that the W and T5xx series use it.

Also, Lenovo want make enough differentiation about the thinness of the T4x0s over T4x0 to make the T4x0s a better purchase proposition. Currently, the T420s uses the 9.5 mm drive, so the T430 been the thicker brother should have thicker parts.

 

This would be nice

 

Well, since all the other machines have the 9.5mm bay drive, using the sound logic you presented, it would make more sense for Lenovo to use 9.5mm on all their products instead of mixing it all up, thus reducing costs of keeping different part inventory.

If the intent is to have larger bays, so be it, but then why do they not offer any proper accessories (appropriately-sized HDD caddy, etc)...?

 

With the renewed focus on thinness, I think 12.7mm drives and bays will go the way of the dinosaur.

 

well for a period of time, the T series and W series (except W700/W701) all had the 9.5 mm drives, and all R series had the 12.7 mm drive.

So now the T510/T520 and W510/W520 all uses the 12.7 mm drive, which uses a thicker laptop chassis.

Given that Lenovo will release the T430u and other thin profile T series, i doubt the Lenovo will dump the 12.7 mm drive in the T430. But these are all speculation and nothing is known till more information is available.

Now the X220 laptop can also use the series 3 dock

 

Aw shucks..

Arrived at the same conclusion but was trying to convince myself otherwise. Really is too bad that Lenovo would do away with that nice, thin drive bay and worse - not offering a proper-fitting 12.7mm hdd caddy...

 

lead_org was speculating. Until the new machine specs are announced it's really too early to worry about it.

I hope they do away with the big bay.

 

Yeah, I understand it's speculation, but I somehow doubt that Lenovo would change to the 9.5mm bay - even though, I, as do you, really hope they go back to the 9.5 bay and dump the 12.7mm bay into the ash-heap of history.

 

i will have a look for you and see what is what regarding the bay drives when i visit Beijing HQ in mid Feb.

 

Will they have the Ivy Bridge machines on full display?

 

Oooo. Where's that happy dancing banana smilie when ya need it...
Thanks for that - appreciate it!

 

Hanging out with the hip ThinkPad users