if I put an s-ata hd in a ultrabay2000, my T23 will work without the main ide hd?

Does the T23 even support SATA in the ultrabay slot?? I didn't think the Ultrabay 2000 spec supported SATA drives. Do you have a tray that fits the T23 and can take a SATA drive? I didn't think IBM made such a tray. Even if it does, the T23 might not want to boot from that drive, but that's an area that I'm not fully up to speed on... Even my T30s are all set up with PATA (EIDE) drives.

Yes it is possible to use a SATA drive in an Ultrabay 2000 adapter and have it boot. In fact, when i saw this post it reminded me that I had to perform a system backup on my T23. So here's what I used and how I did it:

- Ultrabay 2000 SATA HD adapter, sourced from eBay: http://cgi.ebay.com/250730717947 - it's not a genuine IBM part but it does (mostly) work as advertised
- 500GB Seagate Momentus 7200 SATA drive (ST9500420AS)
- 02K8668 ATRX port replicator; because of the...
- 05K6187/05K8874 External floppy drive housing and floppy drive (600 series)
- Ghost 2003 boot diskette

I use the port replicator/external floppy drive as my standard way to boot the Thinkpad with a floppy and still have the Ultrabay free. Why don't I use a USB floppy drive? I have more of these setups than I do a proper USB floppy . With the 100GB main drive in the T23's HD bay and the blank 500GB Seagate drive in the SATA Ultrabay adapter, I boot the system using the Ghost floppy. The only real problem with the eBay SATA adapter is that it does not accept a hard drive with the caddy attached. There's a plastic tray with a hole cut out so there's no problem with shorting out the drive if it's mounted "bare". I cloned the 65GB worth of data into a 250GB partition I defined from within Ghost. It took about 76 minutes (~840MB/min). I then removed the IDE drive and booted the system from the SATA drive without any problems. This post is being typed from the T23 with the SATA drive.

That's quite a bit of ingenuity you've displayed there.

I'd like to get my T22 more HDD space but i can live with twin 80GBs for now. The T30 has two 320GBs and 2 250GBs so i'm ok with that for a while

That is good news that a larger SATA HDD can be installed and used.
Is there any noticable performance benefit ? I presume the bus is still limited to 100 despite the higher speed SATA 300 HD that is in the Ultrabay.

I did not perform any data transfer speed tests but the Ultrabay-mounted SATA-based T23 seemed to boot and operate just as fast as the normal IDE drive. I normally do not use the system this way since it does prevent using an optical drive (unless it's connected via a USB port or in a docking station).

Updated 7/18/11: I finally got a chance to run a benchmark on the SATA drive in the Ultrabay adapter and a PATA main drive. However, it was using an A31p (not a T23) and the PATA drive was 5400RPM and the SATA 7200RPM.

viewtopic.php?p=640647#p640647

I've seen SATA tray for ultrabay 2000 on feebay. I'm considering getting one so i can use the 500GBs that i bought for my wife in my ancient T22 & T30s. I'll let you all know how it works out if i get one.

I put an offer in on two of the trays, so we'll see how it works out. If I can use Hitachi 500GBs instead of WD 250s I'm in. Hitachis are better drives.

The seller agreed to sell me two at my offered price, so we'll see how these work soon enough.