Question about ultrabay for T400

If I buy an Adapter II for my T400 and install another harddrive into the bay will it run at the same speeds as the internal harddrive(the one not in the ultrabay) or is it a slower connection?

 

T400 has SATA for both optical drive and primary drive bays. Both work at 3Gbps according to this. This differs to the older ICH8M equipped T61p that has a SATA primary bay and PATA optical bay interface, limited to 1.5Gbps on the former (by bios) and 87MB/s on the latter.

 

GREAT, thanks a lot.. I have a couple laptop harddrives not in use and I want to install different operating systems to them.

 

Heres a picture(Seagate Momentus 5400.2 60GB) of one of the harddrives, will that fit in adapter? It's a laptop harddrive but from a PS3.. I was wondering if the adapter has a specific shape like the placement of the ports.

 

Looks like a regular 2.5" SATA drive.. so it should be fine

 

Okay that's great, just ordered the 43R1980 from amazon for 61.77 free 2 day shipping.

 

I have an ultrabay battery coming in the mail tomorrow... I just take out the optical drive and put in the battery right? The system automatically starts using it as a battery?

 

Available on ebay for < $15US delivered. And they do work, as this review of this ebay product in a Dell E6400 shows. The T400 and E6400 both use a 9.5mm SATA optical drive.

 

Yup. But be aware that once you pop out the tab to pull whatever is in the ultrabay at the moment, windows may want you to wait to pull out the device while it does its "Safely Remove Hardware" mumbo-jumbo. It only takes a few seconds, but you have to watch for the little pop-up, at least on the T400's I have played with.

 

can i order this one

 

Yes.. or without frontplate HDD activity LED for $18US delivered. Can snag them for even less.

 

Could i theoretically use the adapter hard drive as my main hard drive?


Thank you all for the replies, btw.

 

If you mean can you boot from the adapter -- yes assuming you have set right boot order in Bios.

Also be aware that Windows systems corrupt each other, once you boot from the main drive as C: with the disk in the adapter as D:, the Windows system in the adapter will from then on never boot except as the D: drive. And there are applications that require the Windows system partition to be C:

 

Okay what if I don't change boot orders(I will just select the hard drive on the boot menu) or install applications that require the system partition to be C:, honestly I just want to try out different operating systems without having to configure or remove my factory installed hard drive?

Thanks

 

You could, but why not buy the real thing from lenovo.com for $39.96 and free shipping. You'll have to google how to access the CPP program to get that price, but shouldn't take more than five minutes to do so.

 

I presume you may wish to try Win7RC1. That works fine. I extracted the ISO and with both drives running loaded the Win7RC1 onto my HDD in optical bay caddy (equiv to ultrabay). The setup installs an updated bootloader on primary HDD's C:\ with entries for either OS: 1st HDD (XP in my case) or 2nd HDD (Win7RC1).

Previous comment about corruption Windows installs, I can only confirm that strange anomolies occur when cloning two drives and then booting off one or the other. Seems there is some confusion as to who is hosting C:\ . I resolved this by, for each of the clone drives, booting up in Safe Mode, deleting the ATA controllers and drives, allowing Windows to restart and find all devices. Then using Windows partition Manager as a guide to drive mapping, changed the C: path in registry HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\MountedDevices to point to the desired 2.5" drive's partition.

Can do that with a live running registry, or importing another boot drives Hive using regedt32 if you run into trouble.

 

I was tired of waiting for the adapter to come in so I put the 60gb hdd as my primary and installed win7rc1. Can't find any drivers for it.