T61 2nd hard drive adapter at ebay?

I'm thinking of buying a 2nd hard drive adapter (SATA) for my T61. After some searching around I stumbled upon Notebookelite eBay store ( http://stores.shop.ebay.com/notebookelite).

Now obviously their product is not an original. Does anybody have any experience with their product? Is it a good quality copy? Are there any problems with it? Does it work properly?

I've also noticed they have an external case for the ultrabay slim dvd drive (which I would take out to put the 2nd HDD tray)... Does anybody have any experience with that?

 

I bought my adapter from ebay from the same company that is selling this one - http://cgi.ebay.com/SATA-Caddy-HDD-...=UCC%2BUCI%2BSI%2BLM%2BUS-WP%2BLA&otn=4&ps=33

That one fits yours, mine was specifically for the T500 and it fits it perfectly. You will also need a caddy for it if you want it to fit snugly which can be found here - http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&ssPageName=STRK:MEWNX:IT&item=110290934301

I ended up just using the caddy, not the rails.

If you have any questions let us know!

 

My friend did something similar...It seemed to work for him without any issue.

 

They can be hit or miss.

 

I don't understand why I need the "Hard Drive Caddy Rails"... I thought the HDD just slides into the Ultrabay Slim adapter and is secured with 4 screws. Isn't the "Hard Drive Caddy Rails" used to insert an HDD into the normal location of the main T61 HDD (on the front right hand side...)?

 

I just found the manual on Lenovo's site:
http://download.lenovo.com/ibmdl/pub/pc/pccbbs/options/40y8746.pdf

There is no mention of the caddy rails. Actually there are no screws either. U just pop the drive in and close some kind of latch.

It does mention that if u take the main system drive and put it in the adapter u need to take off the caddy rails first.

 

• The ATA100/UDMA5 interface used by optical bay will limit you to ~87MB/S as benchmarked here.
• The Marvell sata-to-pata bridge chip has a 1W overhead, regardless if HDD is spunup or down. This will decrease your battery life somewhat. If that is a concern consider a PATA ultrabay adapter + HM160HC/WD3200BEVE PATA HDD, as discussed in 2510P thread.

Good pics of the ultrabay adapter and benchmarks are here.

 

I was sure I could only put a SATA 2nd drive... You say I can put SATA or PATA? What's the pros and cons of each?

 

Actually I'm not sure that's relevant... I was going to switch my main drive (WD1600BEVS) to a faster and larger SATA drive and then use the main drive in the bay. Since it's a SATA drive, I need the SATA caddy anyway. It's going to be used for backups only and I don't mind it being slower...

I was thinking of buying the WD3200BJKT to replace my WD1600BEVS. Obviously it will have double the capacity, but how much faster do u think it will be as a main drive? Enough to feel a difference (I am using Win XP)?

Some other questions that just came to me:
1. Will the Active Protection System work on the new drive (WD3200BJKT)?
2. Will it work with both drives at the same time?
3. What about hardware disk encryption, does the WD3200BJKT have that option (I could not find it in WD's site)?

Thanks.

 

Look at the Crystaldisk benchmarks for 4kb reads and seek time. Higher numbers there will translate in quicker XP startup and faster application loading times.

If you want noticably higher performance AND better battery life, consider a hybrid SSD+HDD solution as outlined in DIY: Adding SSD and/or HDD storage using an optical bay caddy. A 30-60GB OCZ Vertex or G.Skill Falcon in the primary HDD bay and existing WD1600BEVS HDD swapped into ultrabay adapter could achieve this.

If need more capacity, then yeah, could add a WD3200BJKT, or could perhaps get one 500GB Seagate 7200.4?

Quite a selection of storage options are available for the ICH8M equipped T61.