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Install A Hard Drive Or SSD In Your Notebook's Optical Bay
By , Achim Roos,
1. Tiered Storage In A Single-Bay Notebook

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 $140, 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.

2. Step 1: Replace The Hard Disk With The SSD

First, we replaced the notebook's internal hard disk, a Samsung Spinpoint M8 M500MBB, with a 120 GB Samsung 830 SSD and installed Windows from scratch. Then, we put the original hard disk into the OptiBayHD caddy. Finally, we replaced the notebook’s optical drive with the OptiBayHD caddy.

This is the test notebook, Dell's Latitude D630. It's not particularly new or sexy, but it remains a good candidate for an upgrade like this one.

1. Remove the hard disk mounting frame:

2. Put the SSD into the mounting frame:

3. Step 2: Mount The Hard Disk In The OptiBayHD Caddy

3. This is the OptiBayHD caddy when it's sealed up:

4. This is the OptiBayHD caddy after removing the screws and opening it:

5. Plug in the SATA hard disk:

6. The OptiBayHD caddy is closed back up, and its screws are tightened:

4. Step 3: Replace The Optical Drive With The OptiBayHD Caddy

After installing Windows on the SSD, the notebook is almost ready to use again. But we still have to put the hard drive-equipped caddy into the optical drive bay, where it will serve as a storage device for bulk data.

7. After removing a single screw, the optical drive of the Dell Latitude D630 can be pulled out easily:

Matching size: The OptiBayHD caddy (top) and the optical drive of the Dell notebook (bottom).

8. After inserting and securing the OptiBayHD caddy, your notebook is good to go. Who would guess that there is now a hard disk behind the side panel?

Conclusion

The OptiBayHD caddy represents an easy to way to upgrade a notebook with an SSD without having to pick solid-state or mechanical storage. By using the two technologies in parallel, you're able to enjoy the best of both worlds.

But what about the optical drive? Increasingly, they're only used to install software or, occasionally, play a game from. You're pretty safe getting everything loaded and then swapping it out. And because the caddy simply slides in in place of the optical drive, it's easy enough to swap back in case you need to load an app or want to watch a Blu-ray movie. That's one good reason to install the SSD internally and leave your user data on a hard drive in the caddy; even if you pull it out, you're still able to boot and run your most important applications.

At about $68 (plus international shipping) the caddy isn't exactly cheap. However, you might find it worthwhile, especially as SSDs come down in price. Cheaper 64 GB drives start in the $100 range, and those numbers are sure to drop as lithography advances and density increases. We used Samsung's 830, but any 2.5" drive will work for this project.