Optical drive replacement caddy for np550p5c-t01us

My Series 5 laptop is vintage 2012. The hard drive is an Hitachi 7200rpm 750GB SATA drive. I can get a duplicate of that drive for $50 on Ebay, and wanted to mount it in place of the laptop's optical drive. The Hitachi is a 9.5mm drive, does that mean the caddy I get should also be that height, or is the caddy height determined by the height of the existing optical drive, which in my case is 12.7mm? Or are all caddies 12.7mm on the outside, but have different "pocket" sizes for the various hards drives and SSDs? I've never done this replacement before, and I'm having trouble figuring out what caddy to buy. It's also not clear whether I need to get a caddy that specifically fits my model laptop, or whether this is all standardized now.

Any clarification would be appreciated, including a link to a caddy that anyone here knows will work with my laptop.

Thanks very much.

 

The caddies are standard parts and the size is determined by the height of the optical bay in the notebook.

The screw holes for fixing the hard drives are always the same distance from the bottom, as is the connector, so a 12.5mm caddy could hold any size of hard drive between 5mm (the thinnest) and 12.5mm.

The one non-standard part is the fascia / face plate. Normally, it is possible to detach this from the optical drive (it is held on by several clips) and then fix it to the caddy (there should be holes for the clips in the same places as on the bare optical drive.

John

 

Thanks, John. Well since the caddy has no electronics other than the connectors, I don't see any reason to pay up for one. So I've ordered one for $5.89 on Ebay. The faceplate isn't really an issue because this switchout would be temporary just for the purpose of cloning the existing drive. I've done a lot of reading, and there appears to be a potential problem trying to clone to a drive that's in an external USB enclosure, and the problem concerns the drive's sector size, and USB' penchant for making everything 4K. So, for $5.89 I thought it would be safer, and probably cheaper, to do a straight SATA to SATA clone inside the computer, with no USB in the way, then put the optical drive back in.

 

That's the way I used to do the cloning when I had notebooks with optical drive bays.

One word of advice, however, remove the original drive before booting the new drive into Windows. If you have done a full clone including the drive signature then Windows can get confused if there are two drives with the same signature and it could well prefer to use the old drive.

John

 

Yes, two drives with the same signature, and both set to be the boot drive. Not a good thing.