Ultrabays. What do I do with them? X21 & X600x.

[ixwood]

Hi

I'm new to all this, but slowly getting there. I'm impressed with the x21 dockable bay thing!

What can you do with ultrabays? Is it just a choice of floppy, dvd/cd or hard drive?

I guess extra hard drives would be the most useful? Do they just take normal drives? Would they take my old ones if I upgraded the main internal drives?

Cheers

[rkawakami]

One of the better resources I've seen that explains what the Ultrabay is and what the differences are between each type, is here:

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

Basically, it's a way of adding on additional hardware by allowing you to swap them in and out of a laptop, docking station or UltraBase. The general use of the Ultrabay is to connect an optical drive (CDROM or DVD) to the system. You can also install floppy drives, hard drives (a standard laptop drive using a hard drive adapter) and even an extra battery. For the X2 systems, you would use a full docking station or what's called a "media slice" or UltraBase. The 600X system has an UltraslimBay already built-into the base of the laptop.

[ixwood]

Thanks, that link's great.

I'd have thought all you extreme thinkpadders would have 200gb hard drives stuffed in all the bays.

The x21 had the ultrabase (I think!). Is the floppy permanent then? I like the idea of having another operating system on a 2nd hard drive.

[mfbernstein]

Minor point, but the older UltraBases support PATA, not SATA, so you're limited to 160GB hard drives or smaller.