Ultrabay HDD Adapter - How do they work?

[canflyboy]

One of the T42's that I had gave up the ghost. Hard drive is still good.

I have a replacement T42 and I'm looking for more memory.

Can I buy a Ultrabay HDD Adapter and stick my old hard drive into it? Does it just replace the CD

Thanks

[SteveS]

Yes, it can give you more disk space, and Yes, you just stick it in place of the optical drive.
I am typing this into a T43 which runns happily with a 160 GB PATA drive in the carrier.
Windows assigns it as the "D Drive"

Be careful of the HDD carriers you see on e-bay. Many are fakes, even with old "IBM" logos on them. I have bought 3 HDD carriers. One was a fake and the dimensional tolerences are off to the point where the hard drive does not fit in the bay opening. The genuine ones can hold a drive with the caddy plate installed.

You still find some suppliers with stock of the genuine HDD Ultrabay Slim carriers. Try a Google search. They will probably cost about twice what the fake ones do on e-bay

[Tasurinchi]

I am typing this into a T43 which runns happily with a 160 GB PATA drive in the carrier. Windows assigns it as the "D Drive"

I have a couple of questions to this ultrabay adapter:

1- Can you run a TP only with the drive in the ultrabay adapter?
2- If you still have stick to two drives (normal caddy + ultrabay), can you choose in the bios with which one to boot?

I'm asking because I've seen in eBay SATA ultrabay adapters (designed for T6x models but that may work in T4x as well). Here in Switzerland I've seen some sellers offering some T40's with no drive/no caddy and was thinking to buy one of these, buy the SATA ultrabay adapter, buy a SATA drive (plenty of options with different speeds/capacities), and put it in the bay.

Will this plan work or do I still need a drive in the normal caddy?

Thanks a lot in advance for your help!

Cheers

[RealBlackStuff]

That works without problems, with just the extra HD in.
There are plenty of boot-choices in the startup-menu in the BIOS (or press F12).

[Tasurinchi]

That works without problems, with just the extra HD in

That's great news! Using SATA drives/SSDs could extend the live of many T4xs this way...

[kiwipad]

Just to add to this, I picked up one of the "fake" ultrabay adapters for a SATA hdd to use with my T42 & T43p. Remember both these use PATA (IDE) drives as primaries (despite the weird PATA-SATA bridge on the T43p).

The setup worked fine with a brand new 500GB WD drive plugged into the ultrabay adapter (in a caddy) with the disk partitioned for both NTFS storage space and as a bootable option for a variety of other operating systems.

Boot selection can either be set in BIOS to boot from the ultrabay first (so if no drive was in the primary slot it would work just fine as well) or by hitting F12 at startup and selecting the boot device required.

However, as a cautionary note, after a couple of months the new WD drive became unrecognizable, sometimes at boot-up but sometimes after a variable time of operation - if i'd booted from it the OS would just freeze or crash; if I was booted from the primary drive the additonal disk mappings would just disappear. As the drive also failed to work in a known good external USB encosure I had the WD drive swapped under warranty; the new replacement immediately failed as above "out of the box".

My assumption is that I might be looking at a bad batch of WD disks here (serial numbers are within a few hundred).

As the first drive worked fine for a few months before failing I don't believe there is an issue with either the concept or the reality of such a setup. And as both "bad" WD disks don't play in another laptop with native SATA as primary disk interface *or* in an external enclosure (when other SATA drives do function in both these configs), I would suggest caution in which SATA drive is chosen (i.e. not a WD5000BEVT from around September 2009 !!)

Hope that's of some use

IG

[Tasurinchi]

Hi Kiwipad

Thanks for the advice! I will keep an eye on this. Anyway... it will take a while until I buy a T4x...