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Add Extra Hard Drive using a CD ROM Caddy (3rd drive in Thinkpad W530!)

I’m currently using a Thinkpad W530. It came with a 512GB  spinning disk hard drive, which I augmented with a 256 GB solid state drive in my mSATA slot.

Recently I decided I wanted even more space. How to add yet another hard drive to my laptop? Answer: using a “caddy” adapter that slots into where the CD drive is!

Get a normal sized (2.5”) hard drive, plop it into the caddy adapter (~$10), and stick it in your laptop where the CD drive used to be.

The caddy is *really* easy to take out on the thinkpad. No screws are involved in taking out the CD drive or putting in the new caddy — just two sliding buttons. Slide the “lock-unlock” tab and then push on the bigger tab, and the CD drive should pop out.

cd_drive_buttons_w530The one thing I struggled with was how far in to to push the hard disk into the caddy. I did need a screwdriver as a pushing tool here, and in the end the strategy was to “wiggle” the drive back and forth, by pushing on the left side with the screwdriver, then the right, and so on until it was almost flush (can barely see the connector). This should leave an opening on the back end about a finger-width wide. I filled this with a bit of foam.

cd_drive_foam_w530When the drive is pushed in far enough, there are four screws which can now be screwed through all the way in the caddy into the hard drive.

Below: one of the screws going from the caddy into the matching hole in the SSD.

cd_drive_screw_w530Below, two of the four screws that go through the caddy.

cd_drive_unscrewed_w530The screws should screw all the way down, when the hard drive is at the proper place in the caddy (holes should line up).

cd_drive_screwed_in_w530 Finally, my host is Windows 10, so I just opened “disk management”, right clicked on the new drive (if it doesn’t show up, in my case it was because I hadn’t properly pushed in the SSD all the way into the caddy), then add partition or somesuch — click  through the defaults (use format NTFS) and voila new drive.

newdiskVoila

Specificcd_drive_screw_w530s:

  • “SSD Hard Drive Caddy Tray Replacement for Lenovo Thinkpad”   for ~$10 on amazon prime.
  • “Silicon Power 512GB SSD 2.5″ 7mm (0.28″) Internal Solid State Drive”, for ~$100 on amazon prime.
  • “Samsung 256gb SSD MSATA” for ~$70 on ebay.
  • Lenovo W530 for $515 ($500 + $15 shipping) on ebay (Yes, it always says “last one available”, ignore that)