Have any E4300 owners replaced optical with a second 2.5" drive?

I'm loosely considering picking up either a 13.3" Latitude E4300 or a 14.1" Latitude E6400, but a feature that's really important to me is being able to replace the optical drive with a second 2.5" drive so that I can have an SSD + 500 GB hard drive setup.

In the stickied thread about adding another 2.5" drive to Latitudes, someone suggested that even though the E4300's optical is a "fixed bay," the drive adapter should fit in there anyway -- it just won't lock into place with a latch.

My questions are:

1) Has anyone with an E4300 tried this?
2) Would anyone with an E4300 be interested in trying this?
3) If you have tried it, are there any downsides? e.g. does the drive jostle around or anything or does it hold securely in place?

Pretty tempting, since the E4300 is super-cheap on Outlet (in spite of its comically-high regular price). It would be nice to have a 13.3" laptop instead of a 14.1" laptop!

 

I have an E4300 and I didn't even know the optical drive came out. If you get this to work, I'd love to toss a hard drive in there for storage.

 

On the same site listed at the end of the thread, they have a e4300 version of their HDD bay. I assume it works the same as their 6400 version. I was right on the edge of buying one, but instead I just got their eSATA cable and case. If someone tries this I'd love to know how it turns out.

Note this isn't the rigged version in the start of the thread, this is an aftermarket part fit to the E-Series.

 

Hey, good eye! Sounds like it works, plus there's a Dell-supported process for removing the optical drive. We should be golden, though if anyone could report in that would be pretty awesome.

 

Just ordered the one nataz was refering to on monday for ~$50. It should come in tomorrow and I'll post what I think after I get a chance to play around with it. I'll post benchmarks of the hdd in the optical bay vs the esata connecter vs usb connector so we can have a decent speed comparision. Let me know if there's anything else you guys want tested!

 

Keeping an eye on this thread, looks promising. Thinking of buying a Dell Outlet E4300 with an SSD, then adding a HDD to the optical bay.

 

I suggest you buy one with the cheapest hard drive option and add the SSD and bigger HDD yourself. You can get them MUCH cheaper from Newegg.com or TigerDirect.com and installation really isnt that hard. I think only ~$175 for a 64GB SSD and around ~$80 for a 500GB 5400RPM HDD. Will literally save you a TON! Not sure if Dell started selling modular bays for 2.5" drives but if they havn't you can pick one up from HERE for ~$50.

 

yea, that newmodus link is the bay we are talking about.

 

Ok, so I just got home and it looks like it came early! Took some pictures and will post them later with the benchmarking results...My initial impressions are not the best quailty but not worse that I expected. One thing of note is that they didnt ship it with the promised esata connector. I might have to give them a call and see if I cant get them to send it out to me as well. Although it's not a major issue for me since I rarely use my optical drive and when I need it, it's not that much trouble to just swap drives...

 

When you say "not the best quality," are you talking about the build quality or a rough guess at its performance?