Adding a aftermarket hard drive caddy in the optical bay (T61)

[reporters]

Hello,

At the moment there doesn't seem to be many vendors offering T61 hard drive caddies.

So I was wondering if whether generic aftermarket caddies such as this are compatible. Is identical screw size and placement necessary? I can probably take of the black pieces from the original optical drive and screw/epoxy them into the caddy. If anyone has done this, it would be great to know what your experience was like.

Thanks,
Ray

[axur-delmeria]

The answer is no, unfortunately.

The T61's Ultrabay Slim has a proprietary (non-standard) connector, so only caddies designed for it (and the Thinkpad T40 generation which originated the Ultrabay Slim) will work.

Here is a sample image of an CD/DVD drive with an Ultrabay Slim connector:



For comparison, standard drives look like this:


The one labeled "Slim ATAPI" is the standard PATA/IDE connector for laptop CD/DVD drives.