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General discussion

Adding 2nd HDD to IBM ThinkPad A30

Feb 26, 2010 5:12AM PST

I have a ThinkPad A30 (Type 2652) with the original 30GB IDE HDD, 1GHz Pentium CPU and 1GB of RAM running WinXP. I desperately need more storage space, and a friend recently gave me a 2.5" 60GB SATA Toshiba hdd2d35. I'm trying to determine the best way to add this drive to my system. An easy method would be an external USB enclosure, but my laptop only has USB 1.1 so I would be crawling. I considered purchasing a USB 2.0 PCMCIA adapter, but I already have one slot filled with a wireless network adapter and I prefer not to have too many wires and protrusions all over the place.

My preferred option would be to install the drive internally via an UltraBay adapter (such as 40Y8725) so that I can leave the old drive as-is and possibly install a 2nd OS on the new drive, but the more I read about this the more confused I become. Lenovo says that this adapter does not support non-Lenovo drives, but that doesn't make much sense. SATA is SATA, right? I'm also curious about whether I'll need to do anything special to use the SATA drive internally along with my IDE drive. Also, there seems to be a Lenovo version and a generic version of the adapter out there, and I'm becoming confused about what will and won't work. I'm not certain about which ThinkPad models use the same UltraBay technology, because most of these adapters, while they look to be the correct size, do not list the A30.

Alternatively, I suppose that I could get an adapter to allow me to use the 60GB drive as the primary and use the 30GB drive as the secondary, but that seems like it would entail a lot more work. I would appreciate any advice!

Discussion is locked

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Dead end, wrong interface, false starts, wrong drive.
Feb 26, 2010 6:31AM PST
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Still confused about Ultrabay details
Mar 1, 2010 11:54AM PST

Thanks for the reply--I really appreciate it. Someone pointed me to the site http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/Category:A30 which has a lot of helpful details. It lists the Ultrabays on my machine as IDE. My impression had been that the controller would be a part of the Ultrabay adapter to allow flexibility, especially since there exist ATA to IDE adapters. This is the adapter listing:
http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/Ultrabay_2000_HDD_Adapter
http://www.amazon.com/IBM-Ultrabay-2000-Adapter-19K4480/dp/B00004Z74V/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=electronics&qid=1267245169&sr=8-1
I'm not sure what to think because it doesn't specify IDE. If my machine will only accept IDE drives, I'd sort of like to see it in writing to put my mind at ease.

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Sorry if I was unclear.
Mar 1, 2010 1:19PM PST

I'm not sure if I could have made it any clearer.

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I've got it now.
Mar 2, 2010 12:48PM PST