Thinkpads Forum

Hey there, I recently was given a ThinkPad 600E for free, since the guy that gave it to me was clearing his warehouse. It has seen better days of course, but it isn't too beaten up luckily. It boots up perfectly fine with the CD drive working as expected (I did recover it through a random recovery disk I found in archive.org)

The thing is, it still has its original HDD but I want to change it to something more "solid" just so I am not worried about the HDD suddenly deciding to die on me. So my first question is... what's the best recommended option to get a solid state drive in this?

And second, I am really worried that the plastic will start breaking more and more on me. Ever since I opened it up to do a little inspection, I got worried that the plastic would give up and start breaking apart more than it is right now. Is there, like, an alternative shell for this model? Or something that I could replace the old shell with?

And final question, what's the best way to get a floppy drive for this machine? I know there are the original IBM drives that connect to the port in the back of it, but I want to try and do something DIY since eBay is not officially available on my country, and everything ends up being really really expensive due to shipping costs.

I hope this post isn't really of bother, I am new to owning vintage computers... specially from this era, but I want to give this machine the best treatment that I can give to it.

Welcome to the forum! and no, your post was not a bother.

For solid state drives, you can go with a PATA adapter to either M.2 or mSATA and get an SSD of the same form factor.
There is an option to get a CF card adapter but those are quite finicky with windows.

For the shell, aside from getting another 600E with good plastics and swapping those over, you're out of luck.
You can try to design your own 3d printed solution, but it probably wouldn't be as strong and it will take a lot more time.

There is also a floppy drive for the Ultraslimbay. Get one with one of the part numbers listed here: https://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/Ultrasli ... oppy_Drive
AFAIK, the 600E will not boot from a USB floppy drive.

Grats on the free 600E, it's a pretty cool old vintage nugget. Pretty slick for old software tinkering or DOS gaming if you're into that.

dcfbf pretty much gave you the full rundown, but to add to what he said- I've personally messed with the 600E in particular and some mSATA/M.2 caddies may not work because the BIOS is quite old. CF card adapters are much more reliable with computers this old, but make sure to get a name brand CF card and make sure it's correctly formatted, Windows 95/98 setup is very particular about that sort of thing.

You can use epoxy to fix the parts that have fallen or splintered off. In my experience, 600 is pretty solid even if it's quite old, and the plastic only tends to suffer if the laptop was in a very rough environment (humid, moist, extremely cold or extremely warm). If the plastic seems to be that bad, then yes as dcfbf mentioned you might have to look for another 600 and swap the plastics over. This forum has a collection of the really old Hardware Maintenance Manuals that you can follow for disassembly if you need it. https://thinkpads.com/support/hmm/thinkpad-hmm.html

600s are a bit uncommon but can be found for reasonable prices from time to time on ebay. For replacing plastics, I don't think there's any fundamental differences between the 600, 600E, 600X... someone may have to confirm that though.

For solid state drives, you can go with a PATA adapter to either M.2 or mSATA and get an SSD of the same form factor.
There is an option to get a CF card adapter but those are quite finicky with windows.

M.2 seems to be a more affordable option, and more common. I haven't seen any mSATA drives in the online shopping platforms that we have over here, and Amazon is probably my only option in getting an mSATA drive if I decide that's the way to go. But, wouldn't Windows from this era complain about the massive storage device if I went with M.2?

And also, which adapters do you recommend?

dcfbf pretty much gave you the full rundown, but to add to what he said- I've personally messed with the 600E in particular and some mSATA/M.2 caddies may not work because the BIOS is quite old. CF card adapters are much more reliable with computers this old, but make sure to get a name brand CF card and make sure it's correctly formatted, Windows 95/98 setup is very particular about that sort of thing.

I have seen YouTubers like LGR use CF adapters instead of the more common SATA, or M.2 drives, but looking through a lot of forums... the main issue they impose is that the drive has to show up as a FIXED drive instead of a removable one. I heard that CF drives meant for industrial use usually work really great. Do you have any brands that I should look into?

As for the plastic shell... some pieces have disintegrated sadly. As far as I know, this machine was shelved in this warehouse without much care to it, so the ambient conditions most likely screwed it up. I'm looking into buying 600s from eBay, but I might be able to do so in the future, because shipping to Chile costs like... 50$ on top of the initial price? And that's without considering the taxes.