Thinkpad 600: home-made 'caddy'

[SAE140]

Where do all the hard drive caddy's go ? So often people sell 600's without hard drives ... but why on earth do they keep the caddy's ?

Being stuck for a caddy a few days ago, I resorted to some lateral thinking:
The first job being to lift the hard drive up a little, and I found that thin card (0.5mm thick) cut to 100 x 73 mm inserted under the drive works fine, with one corner cut off to clear the drive securing screw.
Next job was to centralise the drive, by inserting flathead screws into the side holes (leaving the drive securing screw hole clear), until the width between their heads was 73 mm.
So that the drive can be extracted, I fixed some braided fishing line to the 2 innermost screw heads, and made a loop in the line with which to pull the drive out.

With the drive securing screw in place, the drive is therefore supported by that screw and the multi-pole IDE connector.

Yes - it's a bodge - but has proved adequate, and I'll leave it in place until such time as I can source a proper caddy.

Colin

[gator]

Good thinking! Please do post pics if you find time!

[ieee488]

Where do all the hard drive caddy's go ? So often people sell 600's without hard drives ... but why on earth do they keep the caddy's ?

Because there are some greedy idiots on eBay.

Some basically strip everything from the laptop - AC adapter, RAM, hard drive, hard drive caddy, CD drive, etc.

All that's left then is the keyboard and LCD and motherboard.

The cost of hunting down all the components for a regular person is ridiculously high. You might as well buy a brand new laptop for $400.

[joester]

I agree with 1eee488
Take a look at the parts available for just about any laptop...

The caddies sell for a few bucks, the power bricks a few more, The RAM still more, a HDD even more. Parted out, you can make a few buck more than if you were to sell as a whole.

I personally have a difficult time parting with ...parts... I only part with that which I cannot forsee myself needing or using in the future.

Just ask my wife about the basement.

Joe

[SAE140]

Good thinking! Please do post pics if you find time!

Sorry it's taken a while to get some pics for this. D#mned Kodak 'Easy-Share' software - in the end I adopted a 'pull the CD card out of the camera' and imported the images via a USB SD reader.

I also couldn't quickly figure out how to display images on this forum, so I knocked up a quik 'n dirty webpage at:
http://earth.prohosting.com/sae140/index.htm

Hope you can make sense of it ....
Colin

[mgo]

Where do all the hard drive caddy's go ? So often people sell 600's without hard drives ... but why on earth do they keep the caddy's ?

Being stuck for a caddy a few days ago, I resorted to some lateral thinking:
The first job being to lift the hard drive up a little, and I found that thin card (0.5mm thick) cut to 100 x 73 mm inserted under the drive works fine, with one corner cut off to clear the drive securing screw.
Next job was to centralise the drive, by inserting flathead screws into the side holes (leaving the drive securing screw hole clear), until the width between their heads was 73 mm.
So that the drive can be extracted, I fixed some braided fishing line to the 2 innermost screw heads, and made a loop in the line with which to pull the drive out.

With the drive securing screw in place, the drive is therefore supported by that screw and the multi-pole IDE connector.

Yes - it's a bodge - but has proved adequate, and I'll leave it in place until such time as I can source a proper caddy.

Colin

Nice work there! Enjoyed your pictures. I had a drive caddy but no plastic strap for pulling it out, so I used some of that strapping tape that has the nylon strings imbedded in it for strength. At the inside end, I placed another piece of tape at right angles just to make sure it's less likely to come loose. Works great! You may want to consider the strapping tape if you get tired of the floppy string. But heck, what you did will likely last for the life of the machine!

[rkawakami]

Very clear on the process you took. I've taken hard drive caddies without the blue "pull-tab" (e.g., ones for A/T/X systems) and added my own piece of thick clear packing tape so I could use them inside 600-series systems. An inch or two of tape secured to the top of the caddy, extended out about 1/2 inch passed the edge of the caddy and then folded onto itself and another inch or two on the bottom, is good enough that I don't need a pair of pliers to extract the drive. I had to do this several years ago when an eBay seller used pictures of the 600-series caddy (with the tab) but delivered an A/T/X caddy instead.

I've also just pushed the drive into the IDE connector without a caddy but it requires a pair of pliers to extract the drive later on .