Thinkpads Forum

Hi,

I received a new t60p from my company. It has a 2.5" sata drive and i bought a the hard drive caddy for where the cd/dvd normally lives.

I use it for demo's and wanted to soup it up a bit to run a lot of software on it.

I bought a male to female sata cable, i made some subtle changes to the hard drive caddy so i could use this cable to plug into the sata plug in the hard drive caddy. I hung a 3.5" drive off the cable and powered it off a psu i had running close by (the psu was up and running).

I couldn't get the 3.5" drive to start up.

i know the cable works - i tested it

i know the harddrive works as i got it going on another machine.

My guess is that the harddrive caddy needs to have the 5 volt power being used from the sata power plug for it to start up.

Do you have any other idea's?


I like 3.5" drves - they are faster, bigger cheaper!

Cheers Dave

Very interesting experiment mate. Know what? I would have done the same thing if i had a T60p (or a T61p )!
I was thinking about it a while ago.

Can you imagine hooking up a raptor to a tpad?

Another thing i thought was: is there any pc card (edited to: express card) ---> esata controllers around? That might work.

Anyway, please come back with more info on how your thing goes about.

Cheers and good luck

3.5" drives need 5V and 12V

He said he is powering the external drive from an extra dedicated psu

Did you change the BIOS to compatible mode for the SATA drive?

kamaleon wrote:Very interesting experiment mate. Know what? I would have done the same thing if i had a T60p (or a T61p )!
I was thinking about it a while ago.

Can you imagine hooking up a raptor to a tpad?

Another thing i thought was: is there any pc card (edited to: express card) ---> esata controllers around? That might work.

Anyway, please come back with more info on how your thing goes about.

Cheers and good luck

Not only are there Expresscard to ESATA controllers out there, there are RAID ones! I am thinking of doing this sometime in the near future, setting up either a level 0 or level 5. I've got some more research to do on this though and I don't have the cash/need to justify it just yet. I am probably going to have to get an advanced dock so I can have 2 expresscards one for the RAID controller and another for the firewire card.

hehe great stuff