GX640 second hard drive?

Apologies if this has already been covered on the forum...

Can someone tell me if the optical bay can be replaced with a second hard drive?
Is there a specific caddy required from MSI?

Can raid be setup between the normal hdd bay and the optical bay?

thanks

Z

 

You can stick a second HDD in the optical drive bay. I'm not sure where to get the caddy, but it's an option when you customize on Xotic. I woulg guess there's a standard caddy you could buy because I don't think the drive bay is a proprietary size.

As far as RAID, I have no idea Sorry.

 

Optical Bay Hard Drive Caddy (OBHD-SATA12-SATA-B) Black, 12.7mm [OBHD-SATA12-SATA-B] - $44.75 : NewmodeUS, Hard Drive Caddys for Notebooks

Darn, they did not have the 12.5mm Hard drive capable caddy at the time of my purchase........ I gotta buy these now to get a 1TB hard drive!

The optibay HDD above should work. ( I use a previous gen, 12.7mm in height but only supports up to 9.5mm HDD.... )



About RAID, no.
As far as I know, there is no RAID option in BIOS that supports this.

However, you are able to do a software RAID i think.

 

Does anyone here know how difficult it is to remove the optical bay on the GX640? You don't have to actually do it, I mean just look at the screw placement and everything.

I'd like a SSD boot drive with a second HDD, but I'd rather not pay the extra $125 from Xotic, if I could just get the preloaded 500gb and buy a separate SSD and caddy.

 

It's just one screw to remove, then the drive just pulls out. Next to the screw there's a little image of a CD.

 

HEY!! Clicking on the above link caused my Microsoft Security Essentials to go nuts! Some kind of Trojan Downloader.

 

Don't manipulate the link, please.

Such a lame trick to make people download weird things....

 

I don't understand. All I did was quote your post. Or are you directing your statement at someone else?

 

Don't be so angry and fightful,

About second HDD instead of DVD drive - It's fully possible.
About RAID capabilities: even asus g51 doesn't have proper RAID 0 config to provide both speed and capacity. I think that MSI didn't care about this feature properly thus you can just use two HDD's but without RAID.

 

How reliable is newmodelus? Thinking about ordering one of those caddy, I miss my ssd but I need the space for my steam games .

 

They are reliable I'm getting one myself

 

Can the ODD's faceplate be transfer to the caddy (12.7mm OBHD)? I should be able to use the 12.7mm version right? Thanks !

 

The ODD faceplate can be transferred. All the information about it is provided in product description on newmodeus Web page. Here is the link to the product:
Optical Bay Hard Drive Caddy (OBHD-SATA12-SATA-BU) Univ, 12.7mm [OBHD-SATA12-SATA-BU] - $44.75 : NewmodeUS, Hard Drive Caddys for Notebooks
I ordered the caddy from newmodeus as well, as my new SSD arrived yesterday. I would like to have some more storage though. I will keep You guys posted about it.

 

I got mine in the mail yesterday and already installed it into my gx640 . Just a warning for all potential buyers, make sure to format your hard drive before putting the drive into the computer's ODD. For some reason there is no option to boot into the main drive (boot priority) and if the drive is not formatted you will get a "insert boot volume" message. However, if you cannot/forget to format the drive, you can go into the bios and do a "boot override" in the last tab. Now to tackle the rattling sound!

 

Sometimes you have to take matters into your own hands to get the Hard-Drive/s you want.

 

Are you transferring the faceplate from the DVD drive to the Caddy? If so, why? Does'nt the standard one on OBHD-SATA12-SATA-B look good enough or fit in the slot right?

I was looking to order the B version for my GX740...

Also, what's this about "rattling sound" FFZERO, is it bad?

Btw, I'm unsure which will be the best shipping option from this company to Denmark. They ship either with FedEX, USPS or something called "Zone rates". What is "zone rates", and how long would it take to get here?

 

Zone rates is the best option for EU , it will takes like 5 business days (FEDEX International Economy with tracking).

1st class international USPS or something will take about 2 weeks. (without tracking)

 

Nice manicure Ghola! What exactly are you trying to show with those pictures? Did you modify something?

 

Without the caddy, you will have a pretty big gap where the original ODD is located. Especially for the gx640 since it use a special faceplate versus the standard one you see on newmodeus site.

As for the rattling issue, its not as bad as I am making it but the noise can be annoying. When you are playing something loud such as battlefield 2 bad company, every time a guy with a deep voice talk you can hear a distortion or the speaker shaking/rattling. I can take out the speaker and it does not have that problem.

 

I wonder if this would do the job equally well: Caddy from ebay
It's certainly cheaper and with free worldwide shipping.

 

The Seagate 2.5" isn't small and the thickness barely fits in the HD area, it's almost twice as thick as a normal HD. The bulge touches the flat surface, acts as another foot....PS I bite my nails ''''

 

The caddy from newmodeus.com works perfectly for me (MS-1722). Faceplate transferred without any problems. My Momentus 7200.3 320GB hardly reaches 35 Centigrade in it.

 

i just got a vertex 2 ssd, and put it in the default spot, then i moved the old 500gb hard drive to a caddy, worked great -- this is the model i got Optical Bay Hard Drive Caddy (OBHD-SATA12-SATA-BU) Univ, 12.7mm [OBHD-SATA12-SATA-BU] - $44.75 : NewmodeUS, Hard Drive Caddys for Notebooks

 

Reviving an old thread but...

I too have the NewmodeUS OBHD caddy and I got it fast, it came very well packaged and shipped with FedEx.

The faceplate was easy to swap and the caddy had no problem fitting in a Western Digital Caviar Blue 1TB drive. (12.5mm instead of the norm of 9.5mm height)

 

Thx for confirming that the caddy works fine with 12.5mm drives. I wasn't sure of that. +rep