HDD on the T60p: can an IDE drive be used in there?

[randyrants]

Hey,

I've got an extra ThinkPad HDD drawer that I've used to swap out HDD's from my T41. Both of those drives are Parallel ATA; my new T60p uses Serial ATA.

I haven't bothered to take the drawer out of the new T60p and I've yet to see the business end of a SATA notebook HDD, so I thought I'd ask... any shot of using the old drawer and/or the old drive? I'd like to think the drawer will be OK - I don't expect the driver to be OK though...

Thanks!

[kwramm]

I asked this question some time ago and the answer was that you can use a t4x hdd adapter with the t60p just fine. Only minor problem is that the t4x bezel is bent inwards on the bottom and the t60 one is straight. But otherwise I've been told it works.

[christopher_wolf]

Hey,

I've got an extra ThinkPad HDD drawer that I've used to swap out HDD's from my T41. Both of those drives are Parallel ATA; my new T60p uses Serial ATA.

I haven't bothered to take the drawer out of the new T60p and I've yet to see the business end of a SATA notebook HDD, so I thought I'd ask... any shot of using the old drawer and/or the old drive? I'd like to think the drawer will be OK - I don't expect the driver to be OK though...

Thanks!

If by "drawer," you mean the 2nd HDD Ultrabay Adapter then, yes; it should work.

[freakwave]

just push you old adapter with your old drives in, it works (doing the same here)

[randyrants]

Naw, it's not the Ultrabay - I wanted to install early releases of Vista on my T41 but I didn't want to dual boot. I asked around on the Ultrabay it sounded like it wasn't a good way to do this (since the main HDD got modified on the install) so I bought an extra "drawer" that replaces the main HDD. One screw out, slide it out, and pop in the new one.

And from what it sounds like, I can use the existing drawer with a regular ATA drive on the new SATA models.

For those of you that are doing this, in the BIOS, did you have to change to Compatibility mode or anything?

[RonS]

You don't have to change any BIOS settings. Just put it in the slim bay and it works.

[randyrants]

You don't have to change any BIOS settings. Just put it in the slim bay and it works.

Cool, and thanks!

I wanted to check because when I installed Windows initially I was going to flip it to Compatible but left it on the other setting (and just had a driver on a floppy ready to go when I needed it as part of the set up).

Then again, given the way I've seen fresh installs go and how I've seen upgrades from XP SP2 go, I might just install XP first and then upgrade to Beta 2 - it worked out well on a Dell notebook I have!

[randyrants]

Um. I don't know what version of the T60 that y'all have, but there's no way that the IDE drawer from the T41 will work with the SATA interface of the T60p. In fact, it doesn't even look like there's a plug on the drawer this go around: the drive plugs into the notebook directly.

It DOES look like I could plug in a SATA cable, assuming I could reach into the empty drawer, but that's not practical for what I wan to do... guess I'll have to get an additional SATA drive, if I want to swap them in and out.

Thanks.

[GomJabbar]

Maybe this adapter would work for you. I saw it posted in another thread the other day.

Sabrent Serial ATA (SATA) to USB 2.0 Cable Converter with Power Supply

[randyrants]

If it was bootable, sure... actually, I'm pretty sure I could snake a standard S-ATA cable into the drive bay itself, but I'd really like to have the extra drawer... ah well, the search continues!

[Geary]

Are you guys saying that a parallel ATA second HDD adapter should work in a T60p? I have not had any luck with this at all.

The drive shows up in Device Manager but not in Disk Management. In the Volumes tab of the drive properties in Device Manager, the Populate button does not fill in any volume information.

The adapter is a 62P4533/62P4532. I tried two of them, with two or three different drives, all with the same results.

The CD/DVD multiburner drive works fine in the machine.