Thinkpads Forum

Hi there,

I've got a 600E with a cd burner in the bay. Would now like to add a DVD drive, but need one of those removable plastic bay thingies to put it in. Looked around on ebay and found somebody getting shot off his X30 DVD drive.

Question is, does it fit?

I searched the forum but found no apparent answer... The IBM site did not help me any further either, nor did their customer service. Does anybody out there know?

Any help is much appreciated

Cheers

Ingo

You can get a bare drive and transfer the plastic thingy off of your current one.

I did this to replace the original 24x CDROM with a DVDROM/CDRW I bought online. The only issue I had with the process was that I needed to buy a really small phillips screwdriver (#00 or #000, I think) to get the proper grip on the screw to break the factory-applied threadlocker. There's six screws on the sides and rear to remove.

Are you going to keep the burner and swap between that and the DVD drive? It might be easier in the long run to get a drive that does both so you don't have to keep swapping (less cycles on the connectors).

I even went so far as to scare up the external floppy housing for my 600 - I use it so infrequently that it didn't make sense to go through the pain of shutting down and swapping the bay devices (98SE never seemed to hot-swap all that well). I don't think I've actually had my optical drive out of the ultraslimbay in two years, except to look at the label to tell someone what the make/model was.

Rob

Thanks for your quick answer, Rob!

I already replaced the original CD with a Rico burner. Worked fine.
Now I want exactly what you said, swap. Xubuntu works like a dream on my 600E 4AU (although I did have to do the sound manually) - wouldn't know about Windows, I'm afraid.
Well, ideally I would like just the plastic thing cos I've got the drive already. I don't seem to be able to get hold of it anywhere though!
Of course you are right in saying that I should get a combo drive - there is, however, some expenditure involved... Perhaps it is worth looking into.
As for the floppy - I was considering slaughtering it so that an optical drive woult fit, but decided against it. I'd be sure to ruin it
So, does anybody have a plastic thing to put a drive in

Cheers

I think you can obtain one from a company called ultradrives.com. I've never dealt with this company and this is not an endorsement, but it is one place where they appear to be available for sale online in the U.S.:
IBM Thinkpad 600 plastics and bezel / faceplate for CD/DVD drive

Note, however, that the front faceplate/bezel will be different depending on which drive you are installing inside the plastic casing thingy. The one above is, I think, designed for a specific series of Toshiba drives only. This will not affect the rest of the plastic housing, only the front faceplate. You may have to use a different front faceplate or modify slightly the faceplate that came with your drive in order for it to fit smoothly in your 600.

More information about all this and a list of which Toshiba drives will exactly match the faceplate of a 600 series OEM Toshiba CD/DVD drive is available in the following thread:
Find the right optical drive to fit 600X

Phil.