Thinkpads Forum

I recently bought a refurb T500 which came with only a CD burner. Is it possible to get a DVD burner from someplace like Newegg or is my only option to get it straight from Lenovo? Slim SATA burners look like they run ~40-50 bucks, but they're way more at Lenovo's site. Does the T500 use a proprietary format?

There is no proprietary format for external drives. Any slim SATA drive with a USB 2.0 interface would be fine.

@Harry, I think you may have mis-understood the question. To me it appears that the OP is asking if there's an aftermarket DVD burner that will fit inside the T500 Ultrabay, not as an external drive (via USB). I did a quick search on eBay and this seller is offering what looks like is a M a t s u s h i t a UJ-862A drive (datasheet here: http://products.panasonic-industrial.co ... J-862A.pdf ). This is confirmed by this post at LF: http://forum.lenovo.com/t5/T400-T500-an ... 460#M23470 .

One possible sticking point would be the firmware level that's used by the drives. That could prevent one from using a non-Lenovo drive inside the Ultrabay, but that's only a supposition on my part. As I don't have a T500 system, I can't verify that this type of replacement would actually work.

Yeah, that's it - I'm looking to replace the internal drive. I realize the Lenovos have a bevelled edge, but could probably look past it if the price was right. My concern would be that I'd buy a drive from someplace and it would still be too tall. Hence my wondering if the Lenovo DVD burner drives were a proprietary size or something.

Thanks!

You would need a Serial Ultrabay Slim burner found on T400, T410, T500, T510, X200 UltraBase. You can't fit anything else there. If you still can't find anything, drop me a PM and I will find you a new Lenovo T500 burner for around $100 with Lenovo warranty.

For what it's worth I did just what the original poster wants, but with an old IBM T30 laptop. I don't believe Lenovo drives are a proprietary height, but you'll have to watch out to get the correct height; it's probably 9.5mm as opposed to 12.5mm, but I haven't checked for the T500. The other issues were:

(1) I needed to take the mounting rails off my old drive and screw them onto the new on the rear and the sides.

(2) The front bezel did not fit the new drive and could not be transferred. I had to saw off part of the bezel of the new drive to make it fit.

(3) The disk burning software would not initially recognize the new drive, but was about 5 years old, so not surprising. Lenovo just sell a rebranded version of Roxio these days. You're probably unlikely to have a problem with your new-ish T500; in my case I found an upgrade to the disc burning software on the net free of charge.