Two HDD Drives in one T60?

[35712]

Hi there!


I would like to know if it's somehow possible to install a second 1,8" SSD drive beside the normal 2,5" HDD.

As my T60 has not arrived yet, I am unable to check it by myself.

Thank you!

[SHoTTa35]

not a 1.8" SSD but the 2.5" ones would work just fine. You can just get the UltraBay SATA adapter or the IDE one and remove your CDRW drive now nd put it there.

[35712]

But there is no mod you can think of? I was wondering if an extra 16GB drive for my windows partition would fit. Unfortunately I need both my optical and high capacity hd drive. And SSDs with more room are far too expensive...

Btw, does the T60 use IDE or SATA to interconnect the drives?

[SHoTTa35]

the T60 uses SATA and i don't know of any adapters you can use for a 1.8" to 2.5."

You need the optical all the time? I find i probably barely use mine, when i had the T42 i had a SSD in the main drive (16GB fits OS and all my programs just fine) and a 120GB in the UltraBay... i removed the optical cuz i barely used it, only to install stuff.

Why do you want SSD then instead of just another drive? For the speed boosts it could possibly provide or what?

[35712]

"Possibly"? Some SSDs are really fast, but most interesting for me is their noise level.

Well, I will have to wait till these drives become cheaper, so that I can buy a big one then...

[runixd]

You can install one in express card slot.

[Greg Gebhardt]

I would not mind if they got a little cheaper but they need to get bigger, too!

[Crunch]

I just installed a 200GB 7200 I ordered last week (well, actually I ordered three of them. LOL) in the Ultrabay slot. You need to get the bay. It works AWESOME. You can even change which hard drive you want to boot from in the BIOS. I almost never use my DVDRW drive, so it's perfect for me. Nothing sticks out, and it's actually a tad lighter w/ the DVDRW out. If I need the burn a quick CD or DVD, simply switch between the drives. It takes 5 seconds, as they're HOT-swappable. This is AWESOME!!! Ultrabay is one of IBM's most genius innovations.

I am writinng this having booted into the 2nd drive where I installed my 100GB 5400 (which I had always thought was 7200...grrr, but that's ok), after I installed the 2nd HDD into the main HD slot. So currently I have 300GB of hard drive space available. When my other 200GB comes in, I'll do a disk mirror, and have 400GB 7200rpm w/Full Disk Encryption. No more backing up on DVD. :D

Theoretically, if you decide to buy the 5400rpm 250GB drives, you could run 500GB, which is half a TERABYTE. HAHA...

What's this about another one in the Express slot? I will have three HD's, but how would that work? Will anything stick out from the Thinkpad?

Do you need the FRU# of the Ultrabay bay? I'll look for it later in case you need it.

[erik]

You can even change which hard drive you want to boot from in the BIOS.

it's easier to hit F12 at startup and choose the boot drive from the list rather than editing the BIOS and rebooting.

[Crunch]

it's easier to hit F12 at startup and choose the boot drive from the list rather than editing the BIOS and rebooting.

Yup, that's true...I only moved the hard drive in the Ultrabay slot up in the boot order, because of a totally unrelated issue, which I will create a thread about in a few mins...

Although, unless I want to switch between Vista 32 and 64, XP, etc., I'll just change the boot order again. Vista 32 will be my main OS, but the F12 option will be highly useful for switching between OS's!

Thanks for putting the idea out. I wonder, is the F12 option also possible when I don't have it set to display the F1/F12 options? I want to say I think that it is, but I'm not 100% sure.