Storage Solutions Optical drive caddy to install second HDD in laptop?

H

HRJ

Disciple
Hi all,

I need to pep up my 4yr old laptop a bit. I am planning to buy an Intel 320 SSD drive, but I want to use it only for the "root" partition. I want to keep all my data on the original HDD. I thought I could put the HDD into the optical drive bay.

But my HDD is SATA and the optical drive has a PATA port (also called Slim-ATAPI I think).

There are some tutorials on the web on doing this:
Best of both worlds: putting an SSD in your optical bay - Super User Blog
and
DIY: Adding SSD or HDD storage using an optical bay caddy
My question is, are these caddies available anywhere in India. The best I could find was some listings in eBay international (available in India through their global easy buy offer). But these will take a long time to ship to India. :no: Are such caddies available locally here (online or offline)?

Thanks,
HRJ
 
I recall that Dell used to provide those caddies to replace DVD/CD with a HDD for its Inspiron & Latitude range of laptops. Do not know if you can use them on other brand laptops. You will have to contact Dell support.

Anyway, all SSDs come with a SATA interface. So even if you find the rare caddy (which won't come cheap, I am sure) you will not be able to mount your SSD in the ODD slot. You could try getting a PATA to SATA adapter.... but then the whole things begins to feel like it is more trouble than it is worth.

Cheers.
 
Thanks for the replies. But I timed-out and purchased a SATA to PATA caddy from eBay. Including shipping and customs, it comes to about 33 USD.

It should arrive in about 10 days. I will write a review once I get it.

tejaswy said:
Anyway, all SSDs come with a SATA interface. So even if you find the rare caddy (which won't come cheap, I am sure) you will not be able to mount your SSD in the ODD slot. You could try getting a PATA to SATA adapter.... but then the whole things begins to feel like it is more trouble than it is worth.
Click to expand...

@tejaswy, My old HDD is also SATA, so I was considering that factor right from the start. These caddies use a SATA -> PATA adapter internally.

apollyon said:
you can get them from NewmodeUS, Hard Drive Caddys for Notebooks
have got and installed caddies from here for D_Payne's Vaio Z and a friends mbp. good quality stuff with very detailed instructions
Click to expand...
Yeah, I had seen the NewmodeUS caddies and they had good reviews. Any idea how much they cost after shipping + customs?
 
HRJ said:
I need to pep up my 4yr old laptop a bit.
Click to expand...

Would it be worthwhile reviving a 4 yr old laptop? The speed boost with the SSD may be noticeable but I am not sure if the investment would be worth it. Reconsider it before you take the plunge!

This link maybe helpful for the installation - M15x Optical Drive HDD Caddy Installation (56k Warning) - Overclock.net - Overclocking.net

The 320 series Intel SSD have gotten an update recently but reports claim that it hasn't still fixed the 8 MB bug yet. So keep an eye out for those!
 
Aan update: my order from eBay arrived a few days back.

I managed to take out the optical drive easily (I had done it once before). There were a few tense moments while installing the caddy. It was not sliding in smoothly, and I wondered if I had got the wrong size. But it went in after a little coaxing and then fit in snuggly.

I had a spare laptop HDD which I put into the caddy for testing, and it is was detected correctly on the very first boot. The read speed is slightly lower than on the SATA port but not significantly. There is a blue LED on the side to indicate disk activity (read/write, suspend/resume).

Gannu said:
Would it be worthwhile reviving a 4 yr old laptop? The speed boost with the SSD may be noticeable but I am not sure if the investment would be worth it. Reconsider it before you take the plunge!
Click to expand...

The good thing about SSD is that, when I purchase a new laptop next year, I will be able to reuse the SSD in the new lappy. It won't be a dead investment later.

And if I wait one more year for a laptop upgrade, the new laptops will sport the next gen ivy-bridge chips from Intel :clap:

The 320 series Intel SSD have gotten an update recently but reports claim that it hasn't still fixed the 8 MB bug yet. So keep an eye out for those!
Click to expand...

Yeah, I am keeping an eye on the forums and waiting for that issue to resolve before I buy it. The sad thing is that in the past few weeks, bugs have surfaced in most of the other SSD models as well. I looked at several forums, including Corsair, etc.

If these can't be solved by firmware updates, it's a bad time to be buying SSDs.
 
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