T61 vs. R61 hard drive and modular bay questions

ZaZ wrote in another thread about T61 hard drive dimensions:

Are these the dimensions for the modular bay where the optical drive rests? Are the T61 ultraslim modular bay options more expensive than the ones for the R61? I'm curious if the 0.2" difference in thickness results in a lesser quality optical drive. Since I don't need WWAN, I'm thinking about considering the R61. Does anyone have any compelling reasons to choose one over the other? I don't need WWAN. Internal and external build quality seems identical but then so does pricing. External port placement also looks identical.

For some reason I can't customize and see the options for the R61 on Lenovo's site, but the side-by-side comparison of R series ThinkPads doesn't show an option for integrated webcam on any of the books? Is this a T61 exclusive?

And what are the dimensions for both models' main hard drive bay? I ask because I assume the physically larger hard drives are cheaper per gigabyte. Is the 12.7mm=2.5" drives and 9.5mm=1.8"?

I haven't owned a laptop in a long time and I hadn't realized that there were different physical sizes now.

 

All Ultrabay devices are design for the Ultrabay Slim, except the drives. All slim devices will work in the R series. There's a gap if you use a slim device, but there's a little rubber flap that closes the gap. I believe only Matsu****a makes the slim drives, while there are many manufacturers for the regular drives. The drives cost the same.

The T61 and R61 are extremely similar, I believe in the end the difference will be that R series will have cheaper pre-configured systems. (e.g. there's an R61 with integrated graphics but without firewire, but no such configuration exists for the T61.)

In my experience, the 0.2" is actually feels like more in real life, since the drive is to the back of the notebook, the keyboard is raised more, and the palmrests are curved, giving it an overall fat look. There's a R61-14W review on the sidebar, try comparing the pics in that review with the T61 review posted here.

Current notebook hard drives are 9.5 mm, the 2.5" and 1.8" refers to the length, not the thickness.

 

Wow, the filtering/censorship robots here really are quite out of line

 

Hmm. It's interesting that there's no premium charged for a thinner drive. In terms of difference in reliability, would you say that there is none?

I knew the 2.5" and 1.8" refered to the length, I just assumed that the different length hard drives would also have different thicknesses. So modern notebook hard drives are all 9.5mm in height? That's interesting.

Although some early reviews suggest you'd be able to mix and match between PC card, ExpressCard, Media card reader, and smart card, it doesn't seem like you'll be able to. This link at Lenovo seems to suggest three set configurations:

http://www-307.ibm.com/pc/support/site.wss/document.do?sitestyle=lenovo&lndocid=MIGR-67724

I wish it was like Sony's where they would just provided a PC card or ExpressCard media card reader adapter.

 

9.5mm is the basic standard these days on HD height. The ONLY 12.7mm drive I have seen was a 250gb Fujitsu that must have had a ton of platters.

 

I was referring to the optical drive, not the hard drive.

 

I haven't actually broken any of the optical drives, even with extreme usage, in my own Thinkpads, so I can't say how reliable they are?

Older hard drives are 12.7mm too, I opened up a 600X a few days ago and it had a 10GB 12.7mm drive.

 

Thank you very much everyone for answering my questions!