Thinkpads Forum

Hi

There are quite a few non genuine ultrabays available on the internet for at highly reduced price compared to the original/genuine ultrabay.

Does anyone have good/bad experiences with these

Is there a particular brand or shop which can be recommended?

Thank you

Malnitz

I think you are asking about the 2nd Hard Disk adapter for the Ultrabay Slim specifically. Right? The Ultrabay is technically the internal cage in a T60 machine.

Harryc wrote:I think you are asking about the 2nd Hard Disk adapter for the Ultrabay Slim specifically. Right? The Ultrabay is technically the internal cage in a T60 machine.

You are so right Its the ultrabay adaptor for a second harddisk to be inserted into the ultrabay where the CD-rom drive normally is inserted.

ThinkPads T6x use a PATA connector in the UltraBay. This means that all 2nd HDD adapters taking SATA drives have a special SATA<->PATA bridge chip inside whereas adapters for older PATA drives only have wires. I have seen reports of problems with 3rd party SATA adapters caused mostly by low quality of the bridge chip. The simplicity of PATA adapters makes them much less prone to any problems. Therefore I would suggest a Lenovo adapter if you want to use a SATA drive with it.

I have 3 of them, all 3rd party; one is PATA, and the others are SATA. They all worked extremely well. The SATA ones will even support 500 GB drives, I don't think the genuine Lenovo ones will do that.

I bought one for a T4x series from China - IBM logos, etc, on it but it was clearly a knock-off. I was a very tight fit in my T4x computers and the drive locking mechanism cracked after not too long. Don't buy ANYTHING from Hong Kong, Shanghai or Bejing. You'll have a 99% chance of getting a fake and after shipping you won't save much.

lifrancis wrote:I have 3 of them, all 3rd party; one is PATA, and the others are SATA. They all worked extremely well. The SATA ones will even support 500 GB drives, I don't think the genuine Lenovo ones will do that.

What is the max size that the genuine will support=

I have two original ones--both support the 500 gb drives I have. The drives are both SATA.

From my experience both fake and genuine sata 2nd hdd adapters could have problem with some drivers (2102 error), especially Seagate, Fujitsu (it seems genuine one does not have problem with Hitachi). However, I can at least predict the behaviour of a genuine one and a cold reboot will make all problem go away. But a fake adapater even has problem with Hitachi drive and I had to try my luck many times to get it work.

The only ones I've seen that had problems were the all-plastic ones. They looked like junk, but the omly problems I had were the fact that they didn't fit right. 15 minutes with a file fixed it.