W520 Ultrabay 2.5" Drive Caddy

Since it seems that there is no official 12.7mm drive caddy, I have been looking on eBay for a suitable one. I've read a couple of reports that some of the cheap caddies such as this were only providing SATA I speeds. I also read one report that this one was working fine, but that was a person using a mechanical hard drive which can't even saturate SATA I.

Is anyone here using a third-party caddy with an SSD and actually getting the SATA III speeds (preferably one from a U.S. seller, so that I'm not waiting for weeks)? If so, which one are you using? I don't mind spending a premium if it's worth it, but I wouldn't want to spend $47 on an adapter that's identical to the $13 one.

 

I can report that I get SATA III speeds on the stock Lenovo caddy.

I also don't use the W520 in a sandstorm so haven't yet felt like the gap was a problem.

PS: Ebay is never my preferred supplier although I do know somewhere in the 100's of pages of the W520 owners thread you will find links to aftermarket caddy's that are reported to work well. Sadly this forum doesn't appear to have a working search engine so you may have to read each page to find the info unless you can do a google search of the forum itself.

 

NewModeUS sells good ones but they're relatively pricey. Not sure why you'd need more than SATA/150 though. Most users put a SSD in their main compartment and use HDD as storage in their ODD one. Even if you put a SSD into the SATA/150, the only thing that will really be affected are transfer speeds since random R/W still have no saturated SATA/150 and the snappiness comes from that and access times (which are not affected by interface).

 

The OCZ Vertex 3 comes very close to saturating SATA III on sequential reads/writes. In the reviews I've seen, the average throughput on boot is over 300MB/s, which exceeds SATA II speeds. Even 4K random access comes close to saturating SATA I.

For the work I'm doing with this machine, I'm reading and writing on the order of 10,000 files at a time, each of which is about a megabyte. By all accounts, the Vertex 3 will exceed SATA I speeds, and will very likely exceed SATA II speeds.

If I didn't need more than SATA I speeds, I wouldn't be asking here. My need for an SSD is not about "snappiness" per se, but rather the use case I described.

 

The point wasn't that SSDs cannot exceed SATA I or SATA II bandwidth limits. Rather, the question that was brought up is why you would put an SSD in the UltraBay: typically, the dual-drive setup that is used is putting the SSD in the hard drive bay and using it as the primary boot and application drive, and then using a large, but slow data-storage HDD in the UltraBay.

In the image of the UltraBay drive you linked to, though, you'll notice it says "SATA 1.50Gb/s," which likely indicates that it's limited to SATA I speeds.

 

I may want to go with dual SSDs in the future, and would rather get a caddy that works properly now than have to buy another one later.

As for the gap in the official adapter, I am concerned about the possibility of dust settling in there. In any case, the gap would be quite an annoyance to me.

 

And the Ultrabay (although rated at the same SATA 3 throughput as the main drive slot) actually benchmark's more quickly for me.

When I had a SSD/HDD combo I ran the boot drive in the Ultrabay for this reason. The speed difference was about +15% in the caddy.