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My Advanced Dock is in; question regarding Ultrabay

Posted: Thu Feb 15, 2007 3:00 pm
by mybellyisempty
My T60WS won't be shipped for another week, but the dock is in now.

Seeing as how I paid $178 shipped for a new unit, I'm pretty happy, but there's one thing that caught me off guard.

It says Ultrabay enhanced.

It looks like the Ultrabay Slim from my T43 fits in there, and I'd assume the T60's will as well, but I haven't tried powering anything on yet.

Are Ultrabay slims compatible with the Ultrabay Enhanced? I planned on taking the DVDDL from the T60 and put it in the docking station, as I tend to use hdds on the road, but now I'm wondering if it'll be compatible.

Posted: Thu Feb 15, 2007 6:24 pm
by rkawakami
A good resource for Ultrabay compatibility can be found here:

http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/UltraBay

According to the information on that page, the Ultrabay Enhanced bay will accept Ultrabay Slim devices. Not having any T60 or Ultrabay Slim/Enhanced equipement, I would say that as long as you can physically mate the device into the bay (keep the power off!) then it should work.

Posted: Fri Feb 16, 2007 2:55 pm
by chan_man
I don't know what ultrabay enhanced is but you can use the ultrabay adapters from a T4x in a T6x. The only thing you will see is that the T4x adapters will have a bevel on the lower edge so it looks like there is a gap there, otherwise works fine. I have a PATA drive in my T60 holding the vista image

Posted: Sat Feb 17, 2007 9:04 am
by mybellyisempty
chan_man wrote:I don't know what ultrabay enhanced is but you can use the ultrabay adapters from a T4x in a T6x. The only thing you will see is that the T4x adapters will have a bevel on the lower edge so it looks like there is a gap there, otherwise works fine. I have a PATA drive in my T60 holding the vista image
Crap, if I'd have known that, I'd have kept the 80gb 7200 PATA and Ultrabay adapter I had, rather than buying a 100gb 7200 SATA from BrentPresley and a SATA adapter. Oh well, that extra 20gb is worth at least 2 extra virtual machines.


According to that link, it should work just fine. The Enhanced just appears to be thicker than the Slim.

...I had this same question long ago...

Posted: Wed Feb 21, 2007 4:03 pm
by wallybear
I had the same question a while ago and I had to answer it myself by trial and error. No one here answered my questions. Here are some simple, direct answers and details....

>The Slim and the Enhanced devices differ in bezels, not interfaces.

>The Advanced Dock will take either Slim or Enhanced devices. One limitation is that you CANNOT boot from any drive that is installed in the Dock. You can boot from a drive installed in an adapter in the T60's Ultrabay.

>So, the bottom line is that either the SATA or the PATA variant of HDD adapter (two different model numbers) will work in the Advanced Dock.

>The SATA drive and adapter are a better choice (in my humble opinion) because all future machines will use the hardware.

>By the way, the Ultrabay interface in the T60 "converts" the SATA drive installed in the SATA HDD adapter to a PATA interface. Hence, the backwards compatibility.

More questions? Write to me....