There are various cheap, off-brand hard drive caddies available on eBay that are compatible with the Thinkpad T520. Are they okay, or should I stick to the genuine Lenovo hardware? I'm looking to replace my optical drive with something else as soon as possible. The drive button is positioned in a way that I keep accidentally hitting it. It has to be the single most annoying thing I've ever encountered on any laptop...

I can't seem to find any pictures of them installed anywhere, nor any reviews. I did try searching, but the search capability on these forums makes it hard to find relevant posts.

Thanks

Hi there,

I have used several cheap eBay ultrabay HDD caddies in my T40 series Thinkpads and i have found them to be fine. Since i havn't used an OEM version, i can't say whether the quality/performance is as good, but the caddies i have used performed as well as i had expected.

The caddies i tried fitted in the bay just as well as the original DVD drives did, They were of pretty good quality and didn't weigh too much either.

I would recommend buying from a supplier in your country instead of from Singapore or China, simply becasue mine took 3 weeks to ship to England.

I've purchased several for both my Ultrabay Slim and Ultrabay 2000 systems and they're worked fine. My recommendation would be to make sure that you can return it without too much of a penalty. By that I mean stick to US sellers who do not charge excessively for shipping, as sometimes that cost is not refundable (read the fine print in the auction description). Some knockoffs may under-perform the factory equipment because they don't support the fastest transfer speeds possible.

I have found that the "fit and finish" of the cheap ones isn't as good, but they work fine

As with the post above, I too have found that the fit and finish are somewhat wanting. One would be a tad tight, and the next one a tad loose. And (if this sort of thing bothers you) they also come with different coloured and shaped LEDs. One would be rectangular blue, and another round red.

I have bought one from ebay - this one - but I have not received yet; anyway, I'm not sure what are those 4 screws for. Any ideea? Can I put the HDD directly in this caddy or do I need some.. enclosure for it (I'm looking to the picture on the right side)?

I have never had to use screws. Slide the drive into the caddy and flip down the spacer flap on the front of the caddy. I usually add a small piece of foam between the spacer flap and the front edge of the drive to wedge it in tightly.

I have one, and have had no problems with it.

I've had good luck with the Lenovo part as well as the newmodeus part (see the link on top of page). More expensive than the eBay knock offs, but works well and the fit and finish is right if you are concerned about that type of thing.

That might've been true years and years ago (when you needed a SATA-PATA converter) but these days the bay adapter is fully passive. There is no performance problem, there is no possbility of that.

chx1975 is correct. SATA caddies for the SATA bays (T400/T500 and up) are 100% passive. There's nothing in them which could "underperform"; they either work or they don't.