Hard drive bay battery

Hey, I was looking at modular batteries the other day and it struck me: is it possible to get the same sort of thing except for un-used hard drive bays?

Lots of laptops have a HD bay that isn't being used so it would be a good idea. My theory is that it should just feed power back through the mobo and then charge from the power source when docked. Can you get these, if so where?

Life would be so much better if they existed

 

Nice first post...

I think you might be onto something, though I'm wondering if there might be heat issues.

*subscribes*

 

good idea...hmmm

 

It would be good because you wouldn't have to kug round an external power pack which plugs into the power socket.

I suppose that if it didn't work then you could always solder the cells to the mobo next to the battery wired in parallel but that wouldn't really be very user friendly and it also would void your warranty not to mention the fact that most people are pretty hopeless at soldering (I'm refering to common consumers, we be smart here )

 

We be's experts! /AliG

I wouldn't feel too comfortable doing that to my new asus, but as far as it goes, I think it would be something certainly worth OEMs looking into...

Mind you, any laptop with spare space inside of it isn't built for maximum portability, so netbooks are out, and high-end machines don't do well on battery anyway (though I gotta say, increasing my battery gaming time from 20 to 40 minutes would certainly make me smile).

I guess your target market would be average machines, and above average machines that are routinely used for not-so-demanding tasks.

 

Not many laptops fit a 2nd hard drive. There are such things as batteries that go in the place of the optical drive though. Dell has made those for years and years.

 

Yeah, I know but that means the loss of your drive.

Quite a lot of people have, for example, a HP HDX16t but they don't really see the need to have 640gb of HD space so they opt for the 320gb single one. That leaves them with some space kicking around which could be used. I reckon it should give you at least half as much juice agin, if not more.

Another example is Alienware, some of their laptops have two hard disks. For someone who has an Alienware, price is obviously less of an issue so they will probably have the extra drive but I think that a fair few people would sacrifice a drive for double battery life. About 30 minutes suddenly jumping to an hour is quite a good improvement wouldn't you say? With life of over an hour there is actually some prospect of using it as a laptop rather than an easily moveable computer which cries when it looses its power supply.

Another advantage is that the size is universal, you wouldn't have to go out of your way to get one specific to your model. I think there is serious business prospect here

 

They'd wanna be hotswappable... I like my DVD-RW lol...

Mind you, I've been inside my laptop and can't see a free bay for a HD, but when I ordered there was an option to add a second one, so what happens there?

 

It might be under the mobo where you can't see it, idk. Notebook manufacturers are very lazy and I doubt they'd want to make a compleetly new layout inside just because a HD is missing, normally what they do is they build a system where you can add everything (excluding wireless cards etc.) and then whatever you don't add they don't put in (the layout is all the same inside, gateway fx's are like that)

So no one has ever done this before?

 

I know this is a bit if a dead post but if someone could move this into a more appropriate forum then it woulld get some posts, I really think there is possibility here, think of all the HP HDX18 and Gateway PFX owners who might be happy because of it