HowTo : Installing a second hard drive in a Compal NBLB2

Hi everyone I just thought I'd share my install experience on how I added a second hard drive to my Compal NBLB2 based laptop. This should work on any laptop based on the NBLB2, such as my iBUYPOWER CZ-11 Touch (aka Armada MT20X).

Like with my old laptop I wanted a SSD for my primary hard drive for speed of boot/applications, and a much bigger capacity hard drive for storage of media files.

To install a second hard drive you have to put it in / swap out your optical drive. This was a no brainer for me. On my desktop I've probably used my optical drive twice in the past year. All my previously optical install media is either online, in disc image files, or have been converted to boot USB flash drives.

Here's what I did:
1.) You will need a small phillips head screw driver

2.) A standard SATA hard drive to SATA optical bay caddy. The one I used was bought from here:
Optical Bay Hard Drive Caddy (OBHD-SATA12-SATA-BU) Univ, 12.7mm [OBHD-SATA12-SATA-BU] - $44.75 : NewmodeUS, Hard Drive Caddys for Notebooks

Here's a picture of mine (took two days to ship to me via standard shipping). As you can see it comes with the bay adapter itself, screws, and a kit to replace the included bezel. I kept the original black bezel it came with as it matches the laptop quite nicely. The caddy is also supposed to support with larger capacity 12.5mm height 2.5" drives (which are up currently up to 1TB in capacity). I used a standard 9.5mm 2.5" drive that came with my laptop (Western Digital Scoripio Blue 640GB).



Installation procedure (excuse the poor quality pictures I suck with cameras):
1.) Shutdown your laptop, unplug it, and remove the battery.

2.) Turn it over on its back side and remove the main large plate that covers your CPU/Memory/Wireless cards slots.

3.) Remove the screw that holds optical drive in its bay (circled in red):



4.) You can now easily push the optical drive from the inside of the laptop to slide it out:



5.) You're now ready to install your drive in the optical bay caddy. It wasn't obvious to me, but the top part of the kit can be removed, and has to be removed to be able to fit the new drive in. The following picture shows the top part already removed:


6.) After you've connected your new drive to caddy, screwed it in, and replaced the caddy top you'll need to unscrew the hook from your original optical drive screw it into your new kit so you can screw it into the laptop once slid in. There should be correponding holes on the new caddy that match the original optical drive, circled in red in the following picture:



7.) Slide in the new caddy and screwed it into your laptop via the hook you attached from your old optical drive. Replace the back laptop cover, plug everything back in and you should be good to go!