Which Enclosure you used to upgrade your Thinkpads?

I am going to upgrade my T400 80gb hard drive to a 320 gb one. To do so a hard drive enclosure is need for the new hard drive. For all who have upgraded which ones have you used or did you just use the Thinkpad Hard Drive Adapter instead.

Don't know if I should just by a cheap enclosure and then return back to the store, or buy the Thinkpad HD Bay Adapter II.

Any Thoughts?

 

Not sure what you’re looking for here. I upgraded my original 80GB drive to a 250GB drive and needed nothing but the drive. I simply removed the two little rubberized edge moldings off the 80GB drive, put them on the 250GB drive and here I am.

 

Any USB 2.5" SATA enclosure should work fine (e.g. this model). This will work easily enough and will allow you to use the old one as an external drive (backup/extra storage).

The ThinkPad hard drive bay adapter is a very interesting option. It would allow you to ditch the optical drive (obsolete in my opinion) and run two hard drives simultaneously. I think the ideal way to use this would actually be a mid size SSD internal and a 320GB+ HDD in the adapter for the combination of speed and space. However, if you don't intend on ditching the optical drive you will probably be better served by the USB enclosure.

One other option (and the method I used to upgrade the drive in my x200 Tablet) is to put both drives into a desktop computer and clone them there. This method is very fast and is now easy to do because desktop and laptop SATA drives use the same data and power cables. Almost any desktop made in the last 2-3 years should be able to do this job fine.

You will also need some software for the actual cloning. Most people on this forum seem to prefer Acronis, but I had good luck with SelfImage. This is free and quick, however, it can't expand partitions so you will have to enlarge the system partition after the fact, or use separate data and OS partitions (this is what I did).