two Sata drives in a bay that originally took 1, advice

Hi,

I have a toshiba tecra a9.
It has one HDD in a bay that is meant to only take one. But I wan't to put two in. Does anyone know if there is an adapter for the SATA connector to be able to connect 2. would that even work? I know my chipset supports up to 3 SATA drives.

To do this I will have to break some plastic so I wouldn't wan't to do it unless I know it will work.

Any advice?

 

Honestly, I wouldn't do it. If it's designed to only hold one drive, use just one drive.

Buy a larger hard drive if you need more space.

 

If you don't use your optical drive very often, you can remove that and put a second hard drive in that space with a special mounting caddy.

 

It's not possible to 'piggyback' an existing SATA connector. You'd need to find another SATA connector somewhere. Perhaps Toshiba has some test points or unused connectors on the systemboard? Eg: ICH8M has 3 SATA ports, just need to tap off the I/O ports as shown here.

If that's a bit technical, then consider using a hotswappable optical bay caddy/optical drive setup as shown here.

 

thanks nando4, exactly what I'm after. +rep
seems like you have all of the best ideas when it comes to notebooks.

I have read the X3100 thread and now this, do you happen to have any more of these sort of notebook modifications?

Edit: can't give you rep right now, I get a message saying I should spread some rep around before I can rep you again.

 

I will take apart my laptop today and take some pics of the interesting parts, if you could maybe point out possible I/O ports, would be great.

also while i've got it open, I get a temp reading by NHC which I don't know what it is. THRM, thermal zone #0, what is it? I ask because when it gets to 58 degrees C it never goes back down. But it used to before I changed the thermal paste on my CPU and GPU(X3100). could that be causing the problem.
since i'm going to open the laptop now I will change the thermal paste again and maybe that will fix it. It's possible I applied too much last time. basically my question is what is "thermal zone", where is that "zone"?

 

This discussion will help, but mostly refer to this pic of the southbridge chip to see the 3 sets of SATA I/O pins on an ICH8M southbridge chip.

Speedfan reads the temperature sensor data from your system, which is what the ACPI uses to turn on fans. Would be worthwhile installing and seeing what it's seeing. Also metallic Arctic Silver thermal paste is not recommended for gpus. The preference is the non-conducting ceramic version.

 

I had some coolermaster thermal paste in there, and right now that's all I have so I put that in again. basically speedfan does the same thing, the temp goes up and then down to 58, but never lower than 58 even though both cpu cores are around 20, and so is the HDD. But it doesn't bother me that much so I will just live with it.


I am uploading the photos to photobucket, some of them didn't come out too clear but I think they are allright. I would like to modify this laptop as much as possible, first thing is to modify the PLL to overclock from 200 to 266mhz fsb. If someone can help me by looking at the photos and providing a suggestion, I will give it a go. the PLL is ICS9LPR501SGLF.
datasheet here:
www.idt.com/products/getdoc.cfm?docid=18688128

Nando4, I belive I have whimed you about this in WP forums, Setfsb hasn't worked yet and Abo has not been able to fix it so I will just do a simple PLL mod.

photobucket album here:
http://s896.photobucket.com/albums/ac167/moral_HaZaRd/

I'm still currenty uploading so you may not be able to see all of the photos yet, so check back a little later please.

also look here for photos of another tecra a9 but this one has a discrete graphics card:
http://www.irisvista.com/tech/laptops/Toshiba-Tecra-A9/taking-apart-laptop-1.htm

thanks for all your help