Ultrabay Hard Drive swapping

Just got my T61p and I was was trying out the ultrabay hard drive adapter. I have a couple of spare sata drives lying around, so I put an 80gb in and it shows up as a drive letter and works fine. I pull that one out and put a different drive (100gb) in and it won't show up. If I reboot the machine with that second one in, it shows up fine, as long as I don't remove it.

Even when the 100gb doesn't show up, if I pull it and put the 80 back in, that works fine. Same with the dvd.

So in short, the 80gb and the dvd both hotswap fine, but the 100gb won't swap - only available if there when booted. Both drives are sata 7200rpm drives. Oh, and I was careful to stop the devices before removing, but that made no difference.

Anybody else out there seen cases of some drives that hotswap and others that don't?

On a side note, is there an external usb ultrabay out there? e.g. on the HP's flavor of bay, they have a usb adapter that you put the bay device in, so you could do something like have the HD in the bay, but plug the DVD in to usb.

CaptTripz

 

The hard drive wouldn't happen to be password protected, would it? I get that if I throw in a protected drive -- gotta shut down, standby, or hibernate to get the password prompt.

 

No, but it does contain a full bootable instance of Vista from my Dell e1505 that I am replacing with this T61p. I'm not trying to boot from it, but just get files off of it.

At some point soon, I will be ready to blow it all away and we'll see if that makes a difference.

 

You might have to go into the system administration tools "Storage Manager" to see the volume. Then you might be able to mount it, etc.

 

Hi everyone

I have a question regarding the difference between the ultrabay hard drive and external hard drives. I ordered a T61 and I am thinking about an extra hard drive to use for backups. First I thought about usual external hard drives with usb connection. Those I know I can use with any pc/laptop through usb connection. But and about the ultrabay hard drive? Does it transfer information faster? And is there a way to use it in other pc/laptops (I mean, without remove and substitute their primary hard drive). By the way, do you guys by chance know if I can use the hard drive of my tecra s2 in that ultrabay? Thanks, this forum has helped me a lot with information, although I am pretty new here.

 

1. It should be quite a bit faster than a usb drive, but slightly slower than the main drive.

2. I cannot say absolutely that you cannot plug the ultrabay into any other laptop, but I will say it is most likely not doable. You would have to remove it from the ultrabay tray and use some other means to connect it to the other laptop.

3. There are certain conditions for using your tecra drive in the ultrabay. The hard drive adapter for ultrabay comes in 2 flavors, PATA and SATA (parallel and serial ), so you would have to get the one that matches your tecra drive. Second the tecra drive has to be a 9.5mm ( .37 inch ) height drive.

 

Thanks for your reply.

So, I am guessing it’s like a trade-off between speed and connectivity: the bay adapter is faster than an external usb option but not that practical as an external usb option.
Hm....

The tecra’s HD is a IDE ATA-6 9.5mm height, a PATA therefore. However, I couldn’t find a PATA bay for the T61, only SATA… I was hoping I could use my old HD in that bay...

 

The ultrabay adapter provides full SATA I support. I really like the ultrabay HDD adapter. I usually keep it in since I rarely need to use the DVD drive.

As for an external USB HDD, I have used several. I have also used several hard drive enclosures to build my own external drive. Out of everything I tried, I am most impressed with the Icy Dock MB664US-1S : http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductReview.aspx?Item=N82E16817198015

This is what I have found to be the best way to go with an external hard drive. It will fit any 3.5" SATA HDD. NO TOOLS REQUIRED! And no drivers necessary. Just flip it open. Slide in the hard drive. And plug it into a USB port.

 

Here is a link to one on ebay for less than $20 total. The seller claims it can be used on a T60 so that should also mean T61. Maybe someone here can verify that it will really work in a T61.

http://cgi.ebay.com/IBM-ThinkPad-2n...ryZ74949QQssPageNameZWDVWQQrdZ1QQcmdZViewItem

Here's one in the US

http://cgi.ebay.com/IBM-62P4554-2nd...ryZ74949QQssPageNameZWDVWQQrdZ1QQcmdZViewItem

 

It works for the T61 from what I've read on the thinkpads.com forum. Seems like I heard that it sticks out about 1mm more than the SATA adapter.

 

Thanks guys!
As long as it works fine, I can live with 1mm extra