Two years ago I made a video about getting rid of wasted space in a laptop by throwing
the DVD drive across the room.
In its place is a hard drive caddy to fit another 2.5 inch drive for something more
useful, like an SSD.
But that video has flaws and missing information that I needed to address in the comments section
and description.
Things like the correct thickness of the caddy, SATA interface in the optical drive bay being
SATA II, and the lack of better instructions in the cloning process.
So for my 10,000 subscribers special, I am redoing this guide from start to finish.
In today’s video I’m going to focus on the hardware bit.
My next video would be the cloning process because this isn’t like a RAM upgrade where
you just put it in and you’re good to go.
Why a dual drive setup?
Why not just get one big SSD?
Well one big SSD, like a terabyte, is still quite expensive but not as bad as 5 years ago.
As of January 2019 a 1 terabyte, 2.5 inch SSD will set you back around $ 130 US at the
lowest.
5 years ago that is how much a 240 GB SSD would cost.
Meanwhile this 120 GB WD Green costed me just $ 27.
A 240 GB is a better value at $ 40 or less.
Does your laptop have an M.2 slot?
If yes, this video is not for you.
Today the vast majority of laptops in the market do have an M.2 slot where you can just
get an M.2 SSD, open the access panel or the entire bottom of the laptop, plug in SSD into
the slot, screw it in, close laptop, done.
You can now begin cloning.
Do you have an mSATA slot?
The thing is known brand mSATA SSDs are now surprisingly rare and if you do find one,
it’s more expensive that it’s 2.5 inch or M.2 counterpart.
So keep watching.
Do you have an optical drive, be it DVD or Bluray?
We need to know how thick it is, what connector it uses, and is it using a standard form factor
or a proprietary one?
First remove the screw that secures the optical drive.
This could be accessed externally or you may need to open your laptop’s access panel
or entire bottom.
(The last one is more advanced and you may need a service manual.)
With the screw removed, pull or push the optical drive out and away.
If it’s using this connector [PATA/IDE] your laptop may be too old and it may not
make financial and practical sense to do any more upgrades on such a machine.
If it is using this connector [Slim SATA], you’re good.
If it’s using anything else, then you are in proprietary land.
You will need a 2.5” hard drive caddy specific to you laptop brand and model.
For those with a standard slim SATA optical drive.
Take a ruler and measure its thickness as there are several height standards: 7, 9.5,
and 12.7mm (plus or minus 0.5 mm)
Now you know what caddy to get, you can go ahead and buy one.
Also go ahead and buy the 2.5 inch SATA SSD you prefer.
Now turn on the computer and see that it boots up...as slow as before.
At least at this point we are sure that the hard drive is being detected properly in the
caddy.
(Well that’s what’s supposed to happen) Now at this point your computer is supposed
to boot up normally from the slow hard drive now in the caddy, but in the case of this
Lenovo laptop it fails to do so.
Picking the boot device reveals that the hard drive in the caddy isn’t being detected
in the boot menu.
So I tried reattaching everything in the caddy.
Didn’t work.
I flicked that tiny switch in the caddy.
Did nothing.
Then I thought I killed a perfectly functional hard drive?
So I swapped the two drives so that the hard drive is back in the 2.5 inch bay and the
SSD in the caddy.
It booted.
So the caddy is defective, right?
Nope.
The blank SSD is detected fine in Disk Manager.
So has this been the case ever since?
Was my old video from 2 years ago better where I have the SSD in the caddy while the hard
disk drive stay in the 2.5 inch bay?
I did an experiment where I placed the caddy with the hard disk drive from the Lenovo and
the blank SSD in the 2.5 inch bay into my daily driver Asus laptop.
Guess what... it worked.
So I guess your mileage may vary.
A side note: you can also use a SATA to USB 3.0 adapter to plug the SSD in, follow the
cloning guide first, then follow this guide normally.
Why do I need to have the SSD here [in the 2.5 inch bay], while the the hard disk is
in the caddy.
Well I later learned that while the SATA interface in the 2.5 inch bay is SATA III which tops
out at 600 MB/s, the slim SATA connector in the optical drive bay runs at SATA II at 250
MB/s.
Most hard disk drives barely saturate SATA II but SSDs, even entry level ones like this
WD Green here, can saturate SATA III.
This isn’t as simple as popping in more RAM. It's a little more involved.
In my next video we will clone the current operating system installed on the hard disk
drive to the SSD.
Though if you feel like just doing a clean install, then go right ahead after you backup
your data.
Anyway likers gonna like, haters gonna hate, subscribe so you don’t miss any of my future
videos, and thank you for 10,000 subs.
When the first version of this tutorial came out I only had 35 subs.