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Install A Hard Drive Or SSD In Your Notebook's Optical Bay

Install A Hard Drive Or SSD In Your Notebook's Optical Bay
By , Achim Roos

You want a performance-oriented SSD in your notebook, but you also need the capacity of a hard drive. Why not just remove your optical drive, drop your hard drive into its bay, and load up a brand new SSD with Windows and your apps?

Of course you'd rather have a notebook with a nice, larger SSD. You get significantly better responsiveness, higher data transfer rates, and lower power consumption, translating into longer battery life. 

Why, then, do most notebooks still come with hard disks rather than solid-state drives? Unfortunately, SSDs are still very expensive per gigabyte of capacity. A 128 GB SSD sets you back at least £120, depending on how fast it is and who's selling it. At that price, you could buy a 1 TB hard disk instead. Smaller SSDs around the 64 GB mark are naturally less expensive, but then you have to start worrying whether your operating system and applications will even fit, let alone your movies, music, and pictures.

That's an easy problem to solve on the desktop. Simply use an SSD and a hard drive together in the same machine. The SSD hosts the operating system and a few hand-picked, performance-sensitive applications, while the mechanical storage is used for user data.

Most notebooks don't give you the luxury of using both technologies, though. Equipped with a single 2.5" drive bay, they force you to choose between a big price tag and small capacity, or more space and lower performance.

But if your mobile machine sports one hard disk bay and an optical drive slot, we'll show you how to make a minor compromise to get an SSD and conventional disk running cooperatively.

Borrowing Space From The Optical Drive

There are already kits available that let you swap out your optical drive and replace it with a 2.5" storage device, be it a hard drive or SSD. MCE Technologies makes them for Macs and NewMode Electronics sells them for a number of PC vendors. We used a kit called OptiBayHD, available in Germany. In every case, the idea is to replace the optical drive with a special caddy that holds any other component that fits. In this story, we're going to swap out the original hard drive, replace it with an SSD, and then drop the disk into the OptiBayHD caddy.

The OptiBayHD comes in 13 different flavors, which differ slightly with respect to internal and external connections, height, supported hard disk height, and front panel color. Between them, you're able to achieve compatibility with notebooks made by Asus, Dell, Fujitsu LG, Samsung, Sony, and Toshiba. The cost is $68 (found on hantz.com), plus shipping. Optional USB or eSATA cables allow you to use the OptiBayHD caddy like an external drive, too.

On the following pages, we'll show you how to add an SSD to a Dell Latitude D630 notebook, specifically, using the OptiBayHD caddy.

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  • 1 Hide
    fjiekie , 26 January 2012 14:26
    you can always use a external optical drive if you dont want the hassle of swapping the bay...
  • 1 Hide
    Major_Trouble , 26 January 2012 18:47
    Hmm installing a high GB game is going to be an issue if installing from a CD/DVD unless you have it external. You won't want to suck up your precious SSD disk space. Just another reason to go and download them from Steam and the like I suppose.

    You could always just go the Momentus XT route (2nd gen - 8gb cache) like I did. Addmitedly it not as fast as an SSD but still a big improvement over a standard 2.5" drive, specially at boot time and with common tasks. That only cost me £135 for 750gb and I keep my blueray drive handy. This caddy way is £120 for the 120gb SSD plus £68 for the drive caddy if you switch out your now old, slow and probably small internal HDD.

    If you don't use your optical drive at all I could see it being worth it for the all in speed advantage but if you still use the drive occasionally it would be an expensive PITA.

    I just wish manufacturers would put out more laptops with 2 x HDD bays for the obvious benefits it brings.
  • 1 Hide
    das_stig , 26 January 2012 19:38
    Any performance loss from running hdd from optical connnection?
    Although th heat generated from hdd in caddy isn't great, where does it go?
    Cheaper to use an external hdd eSATA or USB3 caddy?
  • 1 Hide
    bobwya , 27 January 2012 04:06
    Hmm. What a coincidence I've just received a HDD/SSD bay from NewMode Electronics. This article would have helped me more if it had been put up a week ago!! :-)
  • 1 Hide
    bobwya , 27 January 2012 04:35
    Should say I am glad I went with NewMode Electronics. International delivery to the UK (from the US) was like 2 days - wow!! Build quality (all Aluminum) for the bay cannot be faulted - near perfect IMHO!

  • 1 Hide
    dizzy_davidh , 27 January 2012 08:22
    I did the optical bay -> HDD bay upgrade sometime ago adding an addition 1TB drive to my XPS M1730 laptop, having purchased a bay device to match my specific model and interface needs from a reputable seller on eBay.

    I used an SSD instead of a HDD but the principal is of course the same. Using an SSD could be benenficial for reducing load times but for most older systems you won't get the real performance of the drive because of the interface you are connecting\converting through, which in a lot of cases (no pun intended) is going to be an older PATA interface or low end of the scale SATA rather than the faster type of direct to controller SATA connection you'll probably find your latptop's internal HDD bay is using.

    As for the heat and lack of optical drive concerns;

    With my laptop it is really a desktop replacement and has such a fantastic cooling system (something quite well acknowledged for the high-end Dell XPSs of old) that I just don't notice the extra heat. An SSD wouldn't hardly generate any heat so shouldn't realistically be a problem if you make that choice but bare in mind that the caddy bay devices themselves are usually made of alluminium and the drive you install is screwed directly to it and the caddy acts as a giant heat sink.

    When it comes to the lack of optical drive access, who cares! I have loaded an OS, piece of software, audio\video disc on my machine in years and so I really dont' miss it. The HDD bay I bought is removable (but not hot-swappable) so if the time came that I really needed to re-insert a DVDR etc I could but that wouldn't be an option of course if I had decided to install my OS on the bays devices drive.
  • 1 Hide
    dizzy_davidh , 27 January 2012 08:27
    dizzy_davidhI did the optical bay -> HDD bay upgrade sometime ago adding an addition 1TB drive to my XPS M1730 laptop...


    I failed to mention that with my upgrade I also swapped in some 1TB drives to the standard SATA HDD bays, enabled the Intel on-board RAID and so I now have a 2TB RAID0 array plus the 1TB of the caddy conversion meaning I now have a whopping 3TB of storage in laptop.
  • 0 Hide
    wild9 , 27 January 2012 19:36
    Fjiekieyou can always use a external optical drive if you dont want the hassle of swapping the bay...


    Or mount an ISO image of the CD/DVD. The operating system recognizes the image as a real disk.

    This procedure cuts down on power usage, wear and tear of the disk and drive mechanism, and noise. May not work with all games and movies, however.
  • 1 Hide
    qasdfdsaq , 30 January 2012 05:29
    Course you can get the same thing for less than 1/5th the price in most countries on Ebay.