Thinkpads Forum

Does anyone have any experience with the combination of this adapter and a T61p? I have an old 250GB PATA HDD I would like to use with the T61P I have coming but I found this website http://www-01.ibm.com/common/ssi/cgi-bi ... ppname=USN and buried towards the bottom of the page under the General section was this statement, "The Ultrabay™ does not support the combination of PATA HDD and ThinkPad 2nd HDD Adapter Option (62P4554) though the second HDD adapter can be attached to the Ultrabay physically." Can anyone confirm this to be true? If a SATA drive can be connected to the PATA Ultrabay interface through an adapter why wouldn't a straight pass through to a PATA drive work? Any help would be appreciated before I lay out the money for the adapter. Thank you.

Don't have a T61p but I do have a T60p sitting in front of me with an aftermarket 62P4554 PATA Ultrabay adapter holding a PATA drive that has a Win 7 install done on a T41 a few days ago.

The T60p boots to the SATA drive, the Ultrabay drive is detected and is accessible by Win Explorer.
For laughs, I rebooted to the Ultrabay drive, it loaded the T41 install and began installing the missing drivers.
Of course, YMMV on the T61p; although I do remember trying it in a T61 many years ago and it working.

So I don’t know what the warning means. Of course, the 62P4554 was for a T4x with the curved bezel so it doesn’t look quite right.
I would think a SATA adapter could be merged with a T4x for a flush fit.

I have an extra (aftermarket) PATA adapter if you need one, PM me.

John

Well, there are 2 meanings of the word "unsupported" (which took me quite a while to figure out):
1. It won't work. We know it won't work. We know there's no way to get it to work.
2. Actually it might very well work, but we don't want to provide documentation / maintenance / warranty / answer support calls / see angry customers, so use it at your own risk and don't complain if something goes horribly wrong.

I suspect the second meaning applies in this case.

I have a few of those and they work just fine in my T61s (non p, but no real difference in this regard)

The tray came out with the T40 series, and its use n the T60 series was never really updated.

I mean who would want to use one when the T60 series can use the Slim SATA tray and its higher capacity, lower cost SATA HDDs?

That is except for us packrats who have numerous PATA HDDs hanging around.

Thanks everyone for the confirmation that this will work. I thought it would and was about to order one when I came across that warning in the fine print of the online specs for the T61 and thought I'd better check before throwing my money away.

Eric