retrofitting the mSATA interposer into an E7440?

I just received an E7440 off the outlet. I am very pleased with it, a nice upgrade from the E6420 that I gave to my daughter.

Unfortunately whilst I saved money buying off Dell Outlet, about £80 or $150 buying one without the 3G/WWAN card, it meant that the miniPCIe slot was filled with the mSATA card, and the 2.5" bay is devoid of the SATA connector! My intention had been to fit my 1TB electromechanical SATA drive into the bay for bulk storage of my photos and videos. The only good news is that there's still the connector on the board for the drive bay, and also the 3G antennae are fitted, so hopefully I can get the cable/adaptor and retrofit.

A discussion on the Dell forum implies that it should be possible to get the "interposer" bits separately, which consists of the special cable, a mounting frame, and the mSATA to SATA adaptor:
Latitude E7440 hard drive size

Is there anyone who can help with this? Naturally I now wish I'd spent the extra and not had the hassle :-(

thanks for any ideas!
Paul

 

OK, digging deeper it appears that the proprietary cable is HH0YC, and depending on the thickness of the drive, a frame part FCN4M.
I am trying to get a price, it appears different parts of Dell have very different ideas on the cost.

I got a quote back with the two items, HH0YC and FCN4M; the quote reads as follows:


RoHS:Yes,ASSY,CBL,5MM-HDD,E7440 = GBP 9.59

RoHS:Yes,ASSY,CHAS,MSATA-5MM,GOLIAD 14 = GBP 14.78



I think I will simply get the cable as I have am fairly sure I won't need the cage, apparently it's there for fitting slimmer 5mm drives and isn't needed for 7mm.

Unfortunately my 1TB drive, and HGST (which was a noticeable faster drive than the original 320GB that came in my E6420) is 9mm and probably won't fit :-(

I was able to order the cable by itself, placed order today, hoping to have it within 10 days.

 

The cable arrived today; I took some pictures and posted them to my Latitude Pr0n set on flickr:
LatitudePr0n - a set on Flickr
I hope the QR code and part numbers should be useful.

 

Hi there, I am very interested with this laptop and noticed that you have it.

Do you mind telling me how noise is the fan under heavy load.
I have bought Hp Spectre (http://www8.hp.com/us/en/ads/spectre...ultrabook.html) and had to send it back because as soon a fan starts it was creating very annoying noise apart from usual fan humming.
It was like your ears ringing a constant high pitch noise.

I would really appreciate if you could tell me how Dell E7440 behaves

Thanks

 

I replied to asidana, who must have been very very keen to know as I was messaged on flickr, directly as a PM here and though a public post. You should really have created a new thread to discuss noise.

Today I finally fitted the hard drive to my E7440. I bought the WD Slim 7mm drive, and 1TB one, as the HGST drive I had wanted to fit was 9mm and wouldn't fit.

My big problem was that the flat "tape" cable that crosses the drive bay was overly long and bulged up SO much that the drive wouldn't fit. It was too late to send the WD drive back and get the 5mm Seagate superslim 500G, and besides, the cable was bulging up so much I thought that might not fit either.

My only choice, other than buy a much bigger mSATA flash card was to see if I could make the cable fit better.

After reading and re-reading the owners manual many times, and having dismantled a few E6 series laptops at work, and seeing the Dell technician replace the palmrest on my E7440, I figured it was worth a go!

Firstly, I found that the cable was held in place with a double-sided sticky pad, neither end had keys, and I was able to release the cable and re-fit and the bulge diminished somewhat, but still too much to allow the drive to be fitted. One end of the cable had a very short set of bare parallel connecting "wires" exposed, but the other's bare conduction section was fairly long. After a lot of thought, I decided to cut half a millimetre off the end, and this made the bulge much much better. I took another 0.5mm whisker off the end and now the bulge was quite resonable, enough that it could be displaced to the edge of the bay. I then reassembled the 7440, and was much relieved that it all still working afterwards, with no spare parts afterwards!!

I put some tape over the bottom plate of the laptop to keep the drive off the bare metal, I'll probably review this.

Overall then, very pleased with the success, I now have a 120G ssd (slightly over half for Windows 7, just under half for Linux), and it boots and resumes in seconds; and a whopping 1TB for downloads, media files.

Hopefully the 2nd drive won't impact battery life too much.

 

Hi, I am new to the site so apologise if I get things wrong. I have a E7440 with a 128GB Samsung 841 mSata SSD installed. I have from another laptop a 256GB Samsung 840 Pro SSD and would like to add this. Dell are saying this will not fit as their connector is far too big. I have given them the details and a picture of the cable you have used , but the person I have spoken to does not know whet the other end of your cable would fit.

Can you help with a picture of the connector in place on your E7440 and possible the name of the Dell person you have dealt with. Thanks, David

 

I think the dell person is talking rubbish; the SATA cable has the proprietary connector at one end which attaches to the surface mount header on the motherboard, the other end is totally standard SATA + power and will fit any 2.5" drive.

I got the 7mm WD slim "blue", it slots into the bay without rattling, all I did was put some insulation tape on the laptop baseplate for it to sit on, there's no room for the cradle or clamp that would be needed if you buy the ultraslim 5mm Seagate drive (available in max capacity 500G).

see the link to dell forum as there are pictures plucked from the user manual
Latitude E7440 hard drive size? 9MM? 7MM? mSATA? - Laptop General Hardware Forum - Laptop - Dell Community

 

Thanks for the quick response, I will pass on this info. I have tried fitting in the 840 Pro SSD and it fits well with no interference from the flat cable and I am sure there is space for the connector you purchased. It would help me persuade them they are talking nonsense if I had a photo, I would be really grateful you could email it to me at [email protected]. Cheers, David

 

sorry, but that would mean me opening it up, as I didn't take pictures when I implanted the drive, all I have is a picture of the empty bay. If I do take the bottom off, I'll take pictures next time.

 

I too had that ribbon cable going across the drive bay bulging up a bit. It was not so bad so I was able to put in my Samsung 840 Pro and get everything closed properly. Luckily mine came with an mSATA drive in a SATA interloper so I didn't have to scramble to find a cable. Sometimes getting spare parts is really tough, the forums can be quite helpful since people can help out with part numbers.

Does seem like a bit of a disconnect in manufacturing to have that cable bulge like that.