2nd hdd caddy in dvd bay sata or pata.

I just found these on ebay. If they have already been mentioned, I couldn't find it by searching. They are a hard drive caddy installed in the dvd drive bay. They come in either ide or sata. 12.7mm drive height. They use the standard JAE 50 connector, so they can replace whatever optical drive you have. About $20.00 straight from China. What a simple way to add a huge and cheap sata drive to a older laptop. For all the more I actually use my dvd, I can pull it on my CF 50 and install a 2nd hard drive. Maybe even use one of these instead of the original hard drive. I know they are not shock proof, but it's a great alternative for those of use not really needing the ability to drop our laptop from 3 stories up. Would work really great to swap on those toughbooks with removable optical drives. I make get one just to use for hard drive upgrades. Easy to clone a drive with this.





Drive caddies



Drive caddy

Reply 1 : 2nd hdd caddy in dvd bay sata or pata.

Quote:

Originally Posted by deere245 I just found these on ebay. If they have already been mentioned, I couldn't find it by searching.

See DIY: Adding SSD or HDD storage using an optical bay caddy

Reply 2 : 2nd hdd caddy in dvd bay sata or pata.

I saw it as well and it appears that it might work if you replace a CD/DVD drive in the caddy with this, but haven't tried it yet.

Reply 3 : 2nd hdd caddy in dvd bay sata or pata.

I replaced the optical drive in my Macbook with a 500GB drive. It's used as bulk storage that offsets the small size of the 160GB SSD that I use as a boot disk.



It's a useful mod. I use the extra space every day but almost never used the optical drive.

Reply 4 : 2nd hdd caddy in dvd bay sata or pata.

Shawn, that was something similar to the two IDE/SATA adapters I received from Teo but was planning to experiment with extra FDD caddies instead.



Oh well... if it's 20 shipped, maybe I'd give it a go but... it's just plug & play, right? Don't see any mention of master/slave setting!

Ron in SG

Reply 5 : 2nd hdd caddy in dvd bay sata or pata.

Quote:

Originally Posted by ToughNut Oh well... if it's 20 shipped, maybe I'd give it a go but... it's just plug & play, right? Don't see any mention of master/slave setting! Ron in SG

If you need to hardset slave mode, look at the newmodeus caddy with a master/slave jumper. The ebay caddy has no jumper, and at least on the 2510P won't play nice with another drive set as master. The ebay caddy can be forced to master only. See more details and comparison of these caddies here.

Reply 6 : 2nd hdd caddy in dvd bay sata or pata.

They are $20.00 to $25.00 shipped, so I figure it's cheap enough to experiment with. As far as master / slave setting, pata 2.5 drives have a jumper don't they? At least the IBM and Toshiba drives I have setting here do. Sata may be a problem, but I figured if my CF-50 can be set to boot from the optical drive, then I would be able to put in a huge low cost sata drive and set the bios to boot from it.

I would love to eliminate my floppy drive on my CF 50 and put a hard drive in place of it, but I haven't figured out how yet. Maybe using a cable from a CF 48 Ls 120 super disk? Any help on that one?

Does the caddy / adapter have anything to do with the actual master / slave setting? Isn't that the drive itself? I know you can flash optical drives to change the master / slave setting. On my old HP XE2, it needs both drives to be masters in order to boot from the optical drive or the hard drive.

I am guessing how the bios is programmed may have a bit to do with it. If the bios has 2 channels the both drives being masters is required to boot. If the bios has one channel then you would need one drive to be slave in order for them to play nice. My XE2 obviously had 2 channels and hence needed both drives as master.



Shawn

Reply 7 : 2nd hdd caddy in dvd bay sata or pata.

[quote=deere245;6070831]I just found these on ebay. If they have already been mentioned, I couldn't find it by searching. They are a hard drive caddy installed in the dvd drive bay. They come in either ide or sata. 12.7mm drive height. They use the standard JAE 50 connector, so they can replace whatever optical drive you have. About $20.00 straight from China. What a simple way to add a huge and cheap sata drive to a older laptop. For all the more I actually use my dvd, I can pull it on my CF 50 and install a 2nd hard drive. Maybe even use one of these instead of the original hard drive. I know they are not shock proof, but it's a great alternative for those of use not really needing the ability to drop our laptop from 3 stories up. Would work really great to swap on those toughbooks with removable optical drives. I make get one just to use for hard drive upgrades. Easy to clone a drive with this.



Shawn



Hi Shawn



I tried one of these in my CF-50 it works fine. Ordering form China can take a while. I ordered from here...



http://newmodeus.com/shop/index.php?...roducts_id=186

Reply 8 : 2nd hdd caddy in dvd bay sata or pata.

Remember If you use one of these in a CF-27/CF-28/CF-29 CD/DVD caddy you will have to solder a jumper at R2 on the PCB board at the back of the caddy to force the drive to master if the computer will not read the drive. Then you will probably have to change the boot order in the bios to boot from your preferred drive. For all you not familiar with a Toughbook, the Toughbook is expecting a CD/DVD drive that is set to master.

Reply 9 : 2nd hdd caddy in dvd bay sata or pata.

Quote:

Originally Posted by KLonsdale solder a jumper at R2 on the PCB board at the back of the caddy to force the drive to master if the computer will not read the drive.

Just need to connect pin45+pin47 as shown below to set the ebay caddy to master: