~Toughbooktalk~

Greetings,

Has anyone converted their CD/DVD ROM drive to one of these converters? http://www.amazon.com/dp/B0056EW4A4/ref ... 08RYTAPUA9

It appears to be a relatively easy thing to do, though these converters are designed for non-removable ROM drives, unlike the 74 that uses a latch to keep it in place.

Unless there was a way to use the existing caddy and remove the ROM drive and replace it with a SATA SSD like the Crucial M500
http://www.crucial.com/store/listparts. ... -74GCDADBM

Any thoughts on this?

Thanks,
John

I have one in my cf52 right now. You do need to salvage a caddy from a cf74 dvd drive. The only problem is the dvd drive is PATA. The laptop won't boot with a SATA hard drive in the adapter. Don't ask how I know. You will need to use a PATA hard drive adapter. I have a WD 320gb platter drive in my media bay.

Just to make it clear. The original dvd drive is PATA and the hard drive inside the adapter has to be PATA.
So you need a PATA to PATA 2nd drive adapter caddy. They are getting very hard to find.

Would this work for a CF-29?

Thank you, Shawn. It probably makes better sense to image the Toshiba spinner and copy the image onto a Crucial M500 SSD. I've used Paragon in the past and it has worked out fine. Though, I don't know if it will puke using two different drive types during the conversion.

I just thought it might be worthwhile to use the DVD drive bay for something more useful. If I ever were to need a ROM drive, I already have an external LaCie CD/DVD reader/writer.

Thanks again for the feedback. - John

Again, thanks for the advice. I just got off a chat with Crucial who said the hard drive is also PATA and I'll need to get an adapter before proceeding with a SATA SSD. I'll bet this topic has already been covered somewhere on the forum.

trawlercaptain wrote:Again, thanks for the advice. I just got off a chat with Crucial who said the hard drive is also PATA and I'll need to get an adapter before proceeding with a SATA SSD. I'll bet this topic has already been covered somewhere on the forum.

My CF74 has a SATA hard drive.. I am positive of this. I installed it.

RDClaes wrote:Would this work for a CF-29?

Possibly.....It worked on my CF51, but not on the CF52..The CF29 is the same age as the CF29...