Successfully added second HDD to M570RU

In another thread nando4 suggested getting an optical drive bay caddy to add an additional hard disk to my M570RU (aka Sager 5790). I tried it and thought I'd report back here on my success.

I ended up getting the OBHD-SATA-B caddy from newmode.us at a cost of $42 plus shipping less a coupon.



The only modifications I had to make was removing some plastic where the red arrow is. The standard caddy is rectangular, but the M570RU has a swoop cut out of it. There was nothing behind the plastic though so only took two minutes with a dremel tool.

Here's the caddy installed:



The plastic has a slightly different texture, but it's not like anyone would ever notice.

I installed an old 2.5" Seagate SATA drive I had, plugged it in, and it worked great! The drive bay is designed for a PATA DVD drive but the caddy has a PATA-to-SATA adapter builtin. The performance is a bit slower, but still reasonable. HDTUNE measured the drive in the caddy at 47.5 MB/s. Temperatures were lower then when the drive was installed in the normal location in the laptop. Functionally it's worked great with no problems noted so far.

Incidentally, does anyone have a dead DVD drive in a caddy they don't want any longer? I'd love to get another of the custom pieces of Clevo plastic that locks the caddy into place:



The new caddy stays in place OK without it, but the indicated piece of plastic is what locking catch grabs to keep it from accidentally dislodging. It's not a standard bracket so it's not included with the caddy.

 

Very nice, sbussinger. I like this. +1 for you.

 

This is very interesting!! (+1 goes without saying)

I may now consider buying one of those new Intel SSD's to hold OS and Applications and put my regular HD into this caddy.

Keep us posted about your findings!

 

Already done this since Feb. 2008. Link

 

To get that piece of plastic, try contacting your vendor, or RJTech, the part number is 6-42-M56AV-061

 

The newmodeus and ebay sata-to-pata optical bay caddies use different bridge chips. The newmodeus one has a undisclosed sata-to-pata bridge chip (it's blacked out AND they won't tell me, though I believe it's sunplus or jmicron). The ebay caddy as used by Kaltmod has the Marvell sata-to-pata bridge chip.

In the 2510P thread, the Marvell caddy was found to deliver poor write performance when loaded with a OCZ Vertex shown here.

 

Thanks for the part number! I'll send an email to RJTech and see if they have one. I purchased my laptop from a very lame reseller a couple of years ago and there's no point calling them! As an aside -- I'd never recommend anyone buy from ISTNC.

 

Would this work with a 12.5mm tall drive like the WD Scorpio Blue 1tb?

 

I don't have any tall drives to test it with (I've never used anything but a 9.5 mm hard drive), but I'm doubtful that it would work well. The caddy is the same size as a standard slimline CD so it's only 12.7 mm tall and I question if you'd be able to cram a 12.5 mm drive inside. Theoretically you've got 0.2mm for the thickness of the casing, but that's not much to work with. It's possible that there's enough clearance in the opening to squeeze it in, but you might need to grease it up a bit.

 

my M860ETU got lots of space between it when i insert the caddy..so why M570RU dont have ?

 

I'm just saying that the slot for the caddy is pretty much the same height as the caddy. The height of the extra-tall hard drive he mentioned is almost that same height. So it seems like the top of the caddy might bulge a bit if the tall drive was installed inside.

Now it's likely you could still slide the caddy in, but maybe not. And without testing it (which I can't) I wouldn't want to say so.

 

So would a drive that size fit in the regular hard disk slot instead? 1.3TB on a laptop with just two hard disks would be nice

 

Newmodeus are claiming 12.7mm drives fit in their 12.7mm sata-to-pata caddy.

Add a Second Hard Drive (drive size up to 12.7mm in height) to your laptop using your laptop's optical drive bay. This is a great solution for those that want to take advantage of the higher capacity 750GB and 1TB 2.5" drives! Add it as a second hard drive in the laptop in lieu of a SATA Optical drive. This device/caddy will fit in a "standard 12.7mm-high" SATA CD/DVD/Optical drive bay found in laptop computers. ​

My 9.5mm optical drive has a 9.5mm optical caddy and a 9.5mm 2.5" HDD fits in fine.

 

That would work. The M570RU-U has a 12.7mm Optical Drive

Wheeee!

 

you forgot to count the bottom plate of caddy , if the optical itself is exact 12.7 then can expect it would probably can fit..not certain...
example is 12mm for hdd + 1mm for bottom caddy aluminium plate..its 13mm

 

The optical drive size mentioned matches the caddy size. The bezel itself is the one from the laptop.

 

o..well..so the caddy height itself is actually 12.7mm..well...high possibility it can fit

 

Next question. How is the 1tb 5200rpm drive? I've heard awesome reviews about the 500gb 5400 by WD, next to nothing about the 1tb.

 

times two the write and read speed...
divide by two the access time...
and times two the power consumption...
hahaha

reviews are coming soon...can wait abit

 

I'm terribly sorry to revive a dead thread, I just wanted to know if anyone managed to find a seller for that little DVD locking mechanism, as theriko pointed out, part number 6-42-M56AV-061

 

Very nice indeed, thank you for posting this. +rep

 

interesting concept, i wonder can the sager 8690 do this too, since i noticed i hardly use the dvd drive, another hdd would be much better

 

is there somewhere other than the US you can buy one of these?

 

Newmode has a bunch of Sager/Clevo and generic caddies for a second hard disk.

 

I said other than the USA, that's a USA company, there must be some other places to buy these or similar products?