wrong harddrive for ultrabay?

I have ordered one of these cheap Serial ATA ultrabays for my T500 to use with the harddrive from my extinct 5 year old laptop. When the bay arrived I noticed that the interface is not compatible - the old harddrive has many more pins, and is labelled "Ultra ATA". It seems that the drive is shorter than the space of the ultrabay and I am wondering if there is some sort of connector that could be used. I hope that there is a way to use my old harddrive with the T500. Any suggestions will be appreciated.

 

Your old hard drive used the common interface back then, PATA (Ultra ATA). That interface is not compatible with SATA, the modern hard drive interface. I don't believe Lenovo makes a PATA UltraBay hard drive adapter--but I could be wrong since I've never looked into it--if that is the case, though, you're out of luck.

 

That old HDD is PATA, which will run at USB 2.0 speeds. So consider a USB 2.0 2.5" IDE enclosure to connect it externally. The ultrabay adapter you purchased is otherwise sata, so will work with any recent sata HDDs or SSDs connecting at 3Gbps sataII interface speed.

 

Lenovo did make PATA ultrabay hdd adapter (they were for the old T4x machines), but it is not compatible with the serial ATA ultrabay connector used in the T400, T500, W500, R400, R500, W700, X200 Ultrabase, etc.

 

Thanks, I was afraid you guys would say something like that. Now with an external USB drive, can I make that bootable in BIOS so I can launch the stuff that's on the old drive?

 

I'm not sure your old drive would really boot with the new hardware, but you can at least go into it and grab what's needed off your drive.

 

What’s so special about your beloved five-year-old slow hard drive (HD) that’s likely to fail soon? Buy a new larger HD (they’re cheap), copy the data from your beloved aging HD to it and call it a day/be happy.

 

There are some documents as well as many e-mails stored in a format that I can no longer access with my new computer. I had tried to copy most of the relevant data, before I gave the old laptop to a friend. By the time I noticed that I had not retrieved everything I needed, the old laptop had succumbed to graphic card death, and I think the only way to get the data off is to boot it and run the applications again from my new computer.

 

The ultrabay adapter is SATA and 9.5mm tall, whereas your T510 ultrabay is 12.5mm tall, hence the space you noticed. There are, however, third-party 12.5mm adapters (eBay) if you even want to get a SATA HD. To solve your problem, get a PATA/USB enclosure. Or maybe a cheaper PATA/USB cable with external power, like that:
Eforcity 245340 SATA/PATA/IDE Drive to USB 2.0 Adapter Converter Cable for 2.5 / 3.5 / 5.25 inch Hard Drive / Optical Drive with External AC Power Adapter

 

Thanks for the responses. I think I will both get a cheapo enclosure for the old drive, and some nice new drive for the Ultrabay. Is there some large and fast drive, that is known to work well with the ultrabay that I should be looking for?

 

I've had good luck with the WD Scorpio Blue 500GB drives; I've had two of them for nearly two years in several different settings(in an old Dell XPS M1730, and various configurations including both external and Ultrabay use) and I've had no problems.

There is a 640GB variation of this drive, but I have had one fail a few months after purchase. WD replaced it fairly quickly, and I'm actually using it in my X200. It's a bit of a risk but time will tell if it'll work out just fine or not. No problems thus far at least.

 

Booting any system having a bad video adapter still means no video.

Renee