Second Hard Drive?

Hi -

I just ordered a Sager NP5760 FORCE. As you can from the specs below, I ordered a second hard drive for the modular bay.

However, in reading some of the other articles, it appears that the 2nd HDD typically REPLACES the CD/DVD drive.

So, here is my burning questions:

Can I have BOTH the CD/DVD Drive and the 2nd HDD, or do I need to choose one or the other?

Thanks!


Here are the system specs:

17" WUXGA "Super Clear Glossy" TFT Active Matrix screen
nVIDIA GeForce Go 7950 GTX w/512MB GDDR3 memory
Intel® Core™2 Duo T7400 2.16GHz Processor w/4M L2 Cache - 667MHz FSB
Arctic Silver 5 Thermal Compound
2,048MB (2 SODIMMS) DDR2/667 Dual Channel Memory
100GB SATA/150 Hard Drive at 7,200 RPM
100GB Ultra SATA/150 7,200 RPM 2nd Hard Drive w/ Bracket for Modular Bay
Combo 8x8x6x4x Dual Layer DVD +/-R/RW 5x DVD-RAM 24x CD-R/RW Drive w/Softwares
Built-in Intel® PRO/Wireless 3945 802.11a/b/g
Built-in Bluetooth Wireless version 1.2
8-Cell Smart Li-ion Battery
Full Range Auto Switching AC Adapter
Standard Carrying Case
NO Dead Pixel Guarantee
NO Floppy Disk Drive
NO Built-in Mulit-Region TV Tuner
NO Operating System

 

Having just got mine in a similar config, I can confirm the 2nd HDD REPLACES the optical drive, and also is NOT hot swappable - the O/S MUST be shut down and restarted to recognize the 2nd HDD.

 

It does take up the CD/DVD drive slot. If you find this an inconveniance, then you may want to consider an external hard disk. They aren't expensive and they come in high capacities.

 

When I reviewed the Clevo M570U (Sager NP5760), the test unit I received came with the modular bay hard drive. You can see it in the review:
http://www.notebookreview.com/default.asp?newsID=3260&review=WidowPC

As has been said, you'll need to swap out the optical drive to put in the hard drive.

Beautiful laptop by the way, congratulations.

 

Thanks for the help!

 

Some resellers are offering this in a RAID configuration. How does the RAID set up work, if the hard drive is modular?

 

The RAID-0 (striped) or RAID-1 (mirror/redundancy) will require both harddrives to remain in their place AT ALL TIMES, or the RAID array will become corrupted/lost.

So if you want the RAID in the Clevo M570U, you should not remove the HDDs.

If you set the HDDs to be independent of each other, such as having a C drive and a D drive, then that would be OK to remove the modular HDD.

Technically, its much simpler to have an external 2.5" harddrive and use a program like RetroSpect to backup any new changes in the main harddrive to be copied over into the external HDD.

Or you can have a notebook like mine or the HP dv9000t, which has 2 HDDs and optical drive all internally... so you would not have to deal with switching modular devices or connecting external HDDs.