Enclosure for DVD-RW

[steveg47]

I would love to be able to use the DVD-RW that came with my T60P in a self powered external usb enclosure. Is such a beast available? Recommendations appreciated.

[Ken Fox]

I would love to be able to use the DVD-RW that came with my T60P in a self powered external usb enclosure. Is such a beast available? Recommendations appreciated.

I have seen enclosures like that for sale (forget the website but it would have been somewhere like meritline.com or pcmicrostore.com or one of the other places that sell a lot of enclosures). Unfortunately, although the burner is the right form factor, the connector on the end is NOT a standard IDE notebook connector. Adapting the connector to a standard one would require either disassembly or hacking and I think it would be much more trouble than it is worth.

You can buy small form factor DVD burner drives (notebook sized) either in enclosures or bare, from a whole lot of websites. If what you want is a small form factor external DVD burner, I think that would be the way to go, however:

I ended up with a beast like that which actually once had a CDRW in it which I replaced with a more modern NEC DVDRW. The fact is, however, that these sorts of things (at least to my knowledge) cannot be bus powered so you are going to be stuck with an AC adapter brick and need a cord for that as well, maybe as for your notebook. When you consider that, and the fact that notebook sized DVDRW drives are flimsier and underperform full sized drives, my might be better off just buying a freestanding full sized DVDRW in an enclosure. Liteon has some very nice ones that are way below $100.

[dfumento]

The X60 comes without a CD/DVD drive, so if you search through the forum you'll find suggestions for enclosures, drives without enclosures and entire USB 2.0 drives. I built one myself and I posted to a couple of the threads so if you search on my name you're bound to pick up some information. For about $120 you can pick up a nice Sony unit or for about the same price "build you own."

[steveg47]

Thank you both for responding; however I am not looking for alternative and, for me, unacceptable solutions. Perhaps I need to clarify; I am looking for maximum portability and flexibility. That means that carrying a heavy full sized burner and power supply is out of the question as is carrying a second slim usb housing with it's own slim dvd drive. Because of medical physical limitations I need to keep the size and weight of what I carry to a mimimum without sacrificing flexibity and performance as much as possible. This means that if there is a usb housing that will fit the ultra slim drive that comes with t4x and newer thinkpads then that's what I would like to get.
I have in the past, on older model, t30, x23, etc, removed the side rails and rear plug adapter and the drive could then be used in a standard external housing. This is not an option with the newer slimmer drives.
I also find the performance vs portability tradeoffs for a slim/ultra cd/dvd burner to be more then acceptable.

[claudeo]

If you don't plan to put the drive back into the laptop then of course you have more options because you can disassemble it until you get to a standard connector. However, finding a case to fit and messing around with all the physical reconfiguration may not be worth it when you can buy a complete slim DVD/RW unit that works out of the box. False savings. So, you may have to leave your original DVD/RW behind when you travel. Or sell it on eBay, or keep it around in case you need the original in its pristine condition for whatever reason. In principle, with any of the T4xx and above you should be able to boot and install software from an external USB drive just as well as from a drive in the ultrabay.

I've been looking around for something slim and portable also. For example, been looking at something like http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6827106034 (slot loading) or http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp? Item=N82E16827131043 (tray loading) .
Seems to be just about as compact as they come. In any case, it looks like using an external power supply is unavoidable -- the power requirements of such a drive clearly exceed the 0.5A that a USB port can provide.