adding 3.5" hd

Has anyone tried using 3.5" hd as a 2nd hot swappable drive for their laptop (instead of stock standard 2.5")?

Similar to what's decribed here: http://forums.appletalk.com.au/index.php?showtopic=4433&st=0

I imagine any laptop that supports hot swappable atapi dvd or 2.5" should be able to support 3.5" drive...

 

hmm! if i am not wrong, hot swappable means, you can slide the drive inside the laptop. and my common sense is telling me that, no way you can slide in a 3.5" hd, in the space for 2.5"hd. usually 3.5" drives are used as external drives and connected to the lappy through USB or firewire port and they require additional power supply.

 

You mean in an external enclosure? They sell stuff specifically for that purpose: http://www.canadacomputers.com/index.php?do=ShowProduct&cmd=pd&pid=007248&cid=516

The ONLY requirement is a USB port.

Unless you're talking about some sort of contraption that goes where the Optical Drive bay is. Then it'll work similar to your link, but good luck finding parts.

 

A 3.5" would certainly not fit into my modular bay. Just looking at the dimensions of things, i can tell that. And if it were to fit into the modular bay, it wouldn't be hot swap anyways, warm swap perhaps as in you don't need to restart the computer, but you'll still need to dismount it first. It's never a good idea to cut the power of a hdd without dismouting.
With external enclosures, you can "hotswap" without damage by turning off write caching in disk management, but then again it only means upluging the usb/firewire or whatever you're using to connect it to the computer. Cutting the power is still an unsafe way to turn off a hdd.

 

Thanks for all the reply. Yes, I'm thinking of plugging an 3.5" hd external into the optical/2nd hd bay.

Thought about usb/firewire but too slow, and 2.5" drives are always behind 3.5" drives. Used 2.5" 7200rpm drive before but upgrading is limited (without paying big dollars & can only go up to 100gb).

If one can go from 2.5" to 3.5", surely it can go the other way. Thinking of using a standard 2.5" -> 3.5" adapter, 2.0mm pitch 44 pin headers, and couple of IDE ribbons to make sure the pin position is right (instead of upside down).

Need to supply own power but any external enclosure will do the job.

Any comments (or warnings) will be appreciated.

 

A firewire drive should be plenty fast. I have an 80 GB external 7200 RPM had drive connected to my machine via a firewire cable. The USB was slower since it borrows from the CPU, but the firewire port has its own processing stuff so it doesn't need to borrow. I don't notice a difference in access times between the 80 GB external and internal 60 GB 7200 RPM drives. Games run just fine from both drives.

 

Unfortunately the application (compiler) is disk i/o intensive & hd is the bottleneck at the moment. Need performance similar to internal drives (in DMA mode as well since PIO is too slow as well).

 

And if you could adapt the communication lines to fit the 3.5, what would you do about the much higher power requirement?

 

well, theoretically it makes sense and suppose to work, but i assume the finised producut won't look pretty as most probably you have to leave the bottom part of your lappy open so, the wires can be connected to the hd. there isn't much room inside a lappy's chesis to accomodate a 3.5" hd. if you arent' concerned about the look or the mobility of the laptop, but want performance, you may try that , in ur own risk.

 

Tried it last night with a couple of hd, 40gb ata66 & 300gb ata133.

Interestingly 40gb seemed to connect fine & running in udma 2, but the 300gb can only run in PIO mode, which is probably slower than USB2.

Will try again tonight as I was pretty tired & could have been dreaming things....

 

Now thinking about it, could be my 80 wire cable being too long or I've got pin 34 mixed up... hmm, definitely need brain to work harder...

 

You got the 3.5 to fit in your laptop????

Wait, I'm guessing you want to use it externally, but want to connect it to the IDE connector.

Hrmm, if you can do this successfully let us know~! Imagine the performance gains, plus it would be cheaper than getting a 2.5.

 

How about one of those PCMCIA or ExpressCard SATA adaptors?

 

Gone down that path already with pcmcia but speed is still too slow...(and laptop doesn't support expresscard)

 

Seems to be working now. Running a Maxtor 300gb DiamondMax10 on the secondary IDE channel in UDMA6 mode, getting much better performance than the original Hitachi 80gb 5K100 on the primary in UDMA5 mode, at least according to HD Tach.

Here is the difference according to HD Tach:
Hitachi vs Maxtor
Seq. Read: 35 ~ 20 mb/s vs 65 ~ 35 mb/s
Burst Speed: 92.4 mb/s vs 115.9 mb/s
Random Access: 17.8 ms vs 16.3 ms
Avg. Read: 28.2 mb/s vs 54.1 mb/s

Before I get too far ahead of myself, let me run some tests & see how stable/reliable it is. Also may need to "shield" the cabling a bit better rather completely exposed.

I know it's not the best looking external drive but can't have everything...

 

Finally got it to work!

It kept dropping to UDMA mode 2 and 3 before. Changed cabling & fixed up the removed pin 19. Now it consistently stays on UDMA6. Ran surface test & all seems fine (touch wood).

Now just have to work on making the whole setup to look better. Will get 3.5" external casing (but take out usb as now using ide). Need a bit more work on the modular bay to make it easier to plug the round ide cable in.

 

Congrats! for you determination and success!! Some snaps would be great to see how you connected. I always wondered if we could do that( But in my case I do not have option as I do not have any modular bay).

 

been running it non-stop without any problems.

before upgrade when running software (c++ compiler), CPU was mostly idle waiting for disk, now cpu is 99% utilised. so seems hd is finally keeping up, but now needs faster CPU! Just an endless cycle...

Will post some pics once when all is tidy up.