how much will the hard drive bay adapter affect battery life?

ordered a thinkpad hard drive bay adapter from lenovo.

I am wondering how much will it affect battery life?

is it quiet? does it generate vibration? heat?

I lost my desktop PC and plan to use the T61 that I ordered as my main PC.

 

Same question (with an extra 320GB 5400RPM SATA HDD in the UltraBay).

 

or is it possible to disable the ultrabay device?

 

Well the hard drive will use power when it is being accessed much like the cd/dvd drive. It will definitley affect your battery life, how much? I'm not sure. But I would imagine it would use about the same power as spinning CD at maximum speed. Not sure, just my thoughts : )

 

That is a very good question that you have posed. The power draw will increase with a constantly spinning additional drive added. You should see a decrease in total battery time but i doubt highly that it would be substantial depending on your use of course. If it is an issue you could always pop the bay out to further conserve power when you need it. And to answer Jor, yes you can. Its hot swappable so you can stop it in one of two ways. You can disable it in the device manager in the hardware tab of the My Computer properties or you can just 'eject'/disable it from the icon in the task bar for hot swappable devices ...usb devices etc. There are negligible heat gains but nothing even worth mentioning from the addition of a second drive. Also the vibration of the second drive should also be negligible and nowhere near that of a spinning cd/dvd-rom. In short you should not notice anything different short of slightly shorter battery life.

 

I think that depends on what you are doing.

If you are not actively using the ultrabay HDD, meaning you are not reading or writing files to the ultrabay HDD vs. also not reading or writing files to a DVD drive then I would say the ultrabay HDD will cause MORE battery drain.

If you are using the ultrabay drive to lets say watch a movie (from let's say an .iso file mounted to a virtual optical drive) vs. watching a movie from a DVD then I would say that the ultrabay drive will have significantly LESS battery drain.

I think it takes less power to spin a HDD than it does to spin a DVD drive.

My ultrabay HDD is a 5400.3 so I'm hoping that will help for battery performance as well.

 

It should probably take away like 20-30 min of your time without it

 

Thank you for the reply, guys.

If I disable the ultrabay device using the icon on task bar, can I activate it again through software, or do I have to eject/insert it, like the usb device?

 

That's a good question. I think you can disable the ultrabay device via the "safely remove hardware" function or by using "easy eject" and just leave it in place. Then to reactivate it you will probably either have to reboot or physically pull it out a little and push it back it. If you are not sure how this is done you can click on the "hardware install videos" link in my sig. It is actually not much more difficult to remove and install than a USB drive.

 

Thanks.

Stallen, do you see much difference in battery life with the 2nd hard drive plugged in?

 

I am actually expecting my 160GB 5400.3 HDD to arrive from newegg later this week.

So far my experience with the ultrabay SATA adapter has been with the factory 60GB HDD. I have only used it a couple times to back up using Windows Complete PC Backup and Restore. So I have a good understanding if inserting and removing and general use, but I don't know for sure about battery drain yet.

My intentions are to insert the 160GB HDD when it arrives and keep it in the ultrabay all the time. I only plan on inserting the DVD drive when I really need to... which seems rare for me.

Did you read post #6 above? Those are my understandings based on things that I have read.

 

Yes, I did read your post. I just think you might have a before/after comparison, or something.

I　think you are right. If we have an optical drive in there, no access almost means no power drain. But it's different when it comes to a hard drive. It might be spinning, even when we are not trying to access it.

I plan to do the same thing as you. swap out the optical drive and keep a 2nd hard drive in all the time. But I am at budget and will do this with stock 80G and a 120GB 5400 rpm that I have.

Thanks.

 

Hi, why will the 5400.3 help with battery life?

 

I am saying that the 5400.3 drive will be better than many other HDD as far as battery life goes. Since it isn't my primary drive I'm not overly concerned with speed so that is why I didn't choose a 7200RPM drive. However, the 5400.3 has perpendicular technology and they claim that speed is close to 7200RPM. Further Seagate claims the drive has "4200 RPM-like battery consumption".

http://www.seagate.com/docs/pdf/datasheet/disc/ds_momentus_5400.pdf

 

Stallen

I just ordered 5400.3 today and chose 2nd delivery. hopefully, it'll get here by Friday. it's already shipped out.

See, I have the Hitach 80GB 5400 rpm stock drive and the 5400.3.

I care more about battery life than anything else and would like to keep the 2nd drive in the ultrabay all the time. Which one should I use as the primary disk?

 

If it were me I would want the 5400.3 drive as the primary drive. First, it will be faster. Second, you might also get a slight increase battery performance. Third, it is easier to keep a hard drive properly defragmented when it is less than half full. It would probably become difficult to keep an 80GB HDD less than half full after awhile.

That's just what I would do. I just look at the secondary drive as extra storage space.

 

Cool. I will do that then.