Thinkpads Forum

I'm in the process of upgrading my T61p HDD to a 200GB model. I still want to use my existing HDD for backups, so I was thinking in investing in a hard drive bay adapter.
Just a few questions:
1. Is the hard drive bay, the bay where the DVD-Burner is?
2. Is this the correct one: 40Y8725 (http://www5.pc.ibm.com/uk/products.nsf/ ... eb_express)
3. Are they hot swappable like a USB enclosure would be?

I'm not really interested in a USB adapter, as I find 3 USB ports too few, and most of them use 2 ports.

1. yes.
2. yes.
3. yes, as long as you stop the drive before ejecting.

Sometimes the ultrabay HD cannot be stopped (because some application had accessed it etc).

My workaround for this is to put the machine into hibernation before removing the ultrabay drive. This seems to work fine with no data loss.

You may want to take the ultrabay drive out before you go on the road on battery as leaving the drive in and running will chew up battery life. This is asuming you dont need the drive on the road of course.

rstander wrote:I'm in the process of upgrading my T61p HDD to a 200GB model. I still want to use my existing HDD for backups, so I was thinking in investing in a hard drive bay adapter.
Just a few questions:
1. Is the hard drive bay, the bay where the DVD-Burner is?
2. Is this the correct one: 40Y8725 (http://www5.pc.ibm.com/uk/products.nsf/ ... eb_express)
3. Are they hot swappable like a USB enclosure would be?

I'm not really interested in a USB adapter, as I find 3 USB ports too few, and most of them use 2 ports.

One caution I discovered about hot swapping the ultra bay...if the hard drive has a password, it's very important to do the swap with the machine turned off, not hibernate or sleep. Otherwise the drive will not be seen due to the un-entered password.

ThinkPad Easy Eject will allow removal of the drive while the machine is on, however, unless as others have stated there is something accessing the drive.

I dont password protect my ultrabay drives for the reason mgo stated - it makes them a pain to hot- or hibernate-swap.

Which of course means I have to be careful about what gets store on them.

The password thing is a drag for me because since I clone my entire drive to a drive in the ultrabay, I feel compelled to keep a hard drive password on it, and eventually, I'm probably going to also encrypt my system partitions with TrueCrypt, both of which require the drives to be booted with the OS to be recognized.

However, assuming you don't have your drive password protected, you can just stick it in the ultrabay anytime and safely remove them anytime just by using the EasyEject utility that Lenovo provides and which usually resides in the system tray.