2nd HDD ultrabay adapter for T42 and how will it work?

[fje]

Hi,

I'm thinking in buying an IDE/PATA 2nd HDD Ultrabay Slim adapter for my T42. I have searched over the forum and found many post regarding the topic, but I was not able to find answer to a main question:

Will it work as a "normal" HDD disk?, that is, will the speed be the same as the primary one? Will it be able to work at UDMA 5 for instance (I'm planning to use an old HDD I had in the same laptop that was able to work at UDMA 5)?

And I suppose that once inserted in the Ultrabay and changed appropiaterly the boot devices order I could also boot from it, is this right?

Thanks so much.

[yak]

AFAIK, UtraBay devices connect directly to the second channel of the IDE controller which should answer both of your questions: UDMA 5 and booting should be no problem.

[Binh]

It will work as a native HDD, moreover, you can remove while working just it as a removable device.

However, I would recommend you to buy SATA caddy (as I currently have) instead of PATA one. This give you a chance to upgrade to large HDD (> 250GB).

[fje]

Binh, thanks

The idea of going to SATA was also in my mind, but I already have a 250Gb (PATA) in my T42 as primary disk and, on the other hand I have a set of "old" PATA disks (80Gb, 40Gb, 40Gb and someone smaller....) that are the ones I want to give use.

Aditionally I have read somewhere in this forum that the SATA adapter has a PATA to SATA bridge, because the T42 is "PATA oriented", so, you are not getting most of the benefits of the SATA, as speed for instance....

Thanks.