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Second HDD Adapter

Posted: Mon May 11, 2009 4:02 am
by Hexadecimal
I have thinkpad SL400 - 5PK notebook computer.
I'd like to know if there is any available second HDD Adapter for this computer.
As I'm in Korea, the SL400 is rare in here :)

Re: Second HDD Adapter

Posted: Sat May 16, 2009 12:37 am
by rkawakami
A belated Welcome to thinkpads.com!

I had looked around earlier this week for such an item and it appears that a hard disk drive adapter is not available for the SL series systems. There's nothing in the Lenovo.com support pages which indicates that anything other than an optical drive can be used inside that bay. It's not an Ultrabay in the sense that one can simply push a lever and eject the drive. The PSREF guide for the SL systems say that the optical drive is "fixed, not removable". Yet one can remove a single screw and pull the drive out. There just doesn't seem to be a HD adapter that was designed to be used in place of the optical drive.

For my particular application, I wanted to image an SL500 disk drive. I found that my usual procedure to do this (Ghost and writing to a DVD burner) did not work since Ghost 2003 did not "see" the optical drive. So, I installed Acronis True Image 11, attached a USB hard drive (Seagate FreeAgent Go) and put the disk image there. I tried writing the disk image onto DVDs at first, but the Acronis restore procedure from DVDs onto a hard drive that is smaller than the original (i.e., re-sizing the partitions), involved swapping the first two DVDs in-and-out of the optical drive so many times (over a dozen each) that I gave up and wrote the image onto the USB HD.

Re: Second HDD Adapter

Posted: Tue May 19, 2009 1:25 am
by Hexadecimal
I appreciate. Thank you for your advice.

Re: Second HDD Adapter

Posted: Mon Sep 21, 2009 2:50 pm
by bemymonkey
I'm not sure about Korea, but here in Germany the company Leicke produces HDD caddies that go in the optical drive bay. A few people on thinkpad-forum.de have tried 'em, and they work just fine.

http://cgi.ebay.de/2-HDD-SATA-Adapter-I ... 286.c0.m14

So don't give up hope... maybe there's a distributor in Korea too :)

Re: Second HDD Adapter

Posted: Mon Sep 21, 2009 3:34 pm
by rkawakami
Welcome to thinkpads.com!

Thanks for that information! If they haven't already found their way onto US eBay, then I'm sure that they will shortly.