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9300, 2 hard drives? - Page 3

post #41 of 551
4/16/05 at 10:48pm
Quote:
Originally Posted by mich43L
Maybe you did not see my post or follow its link on the previous page
Ah, missed that.

I still want to know if that adapter and cable will allow me to put a hard drive in place of the optical drive in an XPS2.
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post #42 of 551
4/16/05 at 11:48pm
I just went ahead and ordered all the crap to do it...Ultradrives notes that the part will not be in stock until next Saturday, so it will be some time before we see...also their shipping prices are outrageous! The LOWEST price I could find was $12 for FEDex SlowAss Shipping...and this part weighs about .02 ounces! WTF?
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post #43 of 551
4/17/05 at 12:17am
props to you guys for this project.

Don't know much about motherboard laptops, but for those who don't want raid but still have an HD inside the laptop, would an 1.8inch 4200 rpm do ? ( i ll admit i didnt follow the whole discussion sorry)

but, two HDs... man how much faster windows could operate, bad for traveling though.
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post #44 of 551
4/18/05 at 6:51pm
Quote:
Originally Posted by hammermd
I just went ahead and ordered all the crap
Right on. I would have done this as well, but being in the Bahamas sucks for getting things fast.

One thing I wasn't sure about; does the 50-pin (JAE) socket have the correct gender for what we want to do?

-Doc
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post #45 of 551
4/18/05 at 6:58pm
Quote:
Originally Posted by traquemort
props to you guys for this project.

Don't know much about motherboard laptops, but for those who don't want raid but still have an HD inside the laptop, would an 1.8inch 4200 rpm do ? ( i ll admit i didnt follow the whole discussion sorry)

but, two HDs... man how much faster windows could operate, bad for traveling though.

Hey there,

I'm not sure what you're asking, sorry. Laptops take 2.5" drives which can be found in capacities up to 100GB (120 coming soon) Speeds range from 4,200 to 7,200. (With 5,400 being a happy middle ground.)

As for the speed of Windows, other than running the swapfile on a different drive, a second drive won't make much, if any, difference. This is where RAID comes in, specifically RAID0.

What we're shooting for is more capacity by having a second internal hard drive. The XPS2 does not support RAID.

I hope that helps, but let us know if you want more info.

-Doc
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post #46 of 551
4/18/05 at 9:46pm
Quote:
Originally Posted by Doc.Caliban
Right on. I would have done this as well, but being in the Bahamas sucks for getting things fast.

One thing I wasn't sure about; does the 50-pin (JAE) socket have the correct gender for what we want to do?

-Doc
LOL, yeah, living in the Bahamas must suck compared to north Cincinnati! Anyhow, I'm pretty sure all the stuff is right, but it is kind of hard to tell from some of the pictures....the smaller socket is the correct gender, I THINK....that female end will plug into the male part internal to the laptop and we can then plug the drive (via the female/female adapter) directly into the PCB....this may take some flashlighting/wiggling/poking with a stick, but that's not the real problem, here, of course...heh...I think we'll probably just have to wait and see...hopefully, someone else will get the stuff before me so i don't have to guinea pig-it...i'm no engineer and I suck at putting stuff together, so someone else is going to have to make the first custom 'enclosure' in order to show me how to do it...once we know it will work, this will actually be worthwhile...
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post #47 of 551
4/18/05 at 10:32pm
Is RAID/RAIDO like the generic driver for a second HDD?
Is that what the unknown is here?
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post #48 of 551
4/18/05 at 10:58pm
Quote:
Originally Posted by Gold Beater
Is RAID/RAIDO like the generic driver for a second HDD?
Is that what the unknown is here?
RAID is sort of a tangent for this thread. Read up on it a bit here.

The issue here is twofold. One is that we need to make the physical hardware connect correctly, thus the adapters and such. The second issue is finding out if the XPS2's BIOS will even recognize the 2nd drive once we Mickey Mouse it in there.

-Doc
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post #49 of 551
4/18/05 at 11:11pm
I just noticed that Ultradrives pulled that adapter from their web page. Hmmm.

(Dell must have gotten to them!)

Making a mount should be easy. I was thinking of getting a couple small strips of plastic to make "drive rails" out of, these would be the "sides" of the assembly, and then a sheet of thin plastic to make a platform out of that would be mounded between the two rails and support the drive.

Looking head-on would be something like this:


|____###############____|

The hard drive would be the #'s.

(Who needs AutoCAD?)

Then, just make a "cap" out of black plastic to close off one end for the exterior side.

EDIT: Or better yet, find an old slimline CD drive and gut it, drill holes in the bottom to mount the hard drive. Presto!

-Doc
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post #50 of 551
4/18/05 at 11:59pm
That's not good that Ultradrives pulled the adapter...hopefully, they're just taking it off until Saturday when they get the part in...I did already go ahead and pay them money...

BTW, if you bitch about the shipping charges in the 'Comments' section when you order, they refund you $5 handling that they typically charge 'corporations' for some reason...at least there is a human being reading that stuff...kind of a rarity these days...
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post #51 of 551
4/19/05 at 1:00am
Quote:
Originally Posted by Doc.Caliban
EDIT: Or better yet, find an old slimline CD drive and gut it, drill holes in the bottom to mount the hard drive. Presto!
-Doc
That is what I was going to do!! I have actually ordered a 9300 cdrom with Dell's 90 cupon.....

Quote:
Originally Posted by hammermd
That's not good that Ultradrives pulled the adapter...hopefully, they're just taking it off until Saturday when they get the part in...I did already go ahead and pay them money...
I tried to look today, could not find this.... You guys work on this angle. I am trying to track down some female JAE connectors incase we have to pin it out and make our own I am waiting on a few emails.

P.S. I usually only check mail and forums when I'm at work. I have 19.2k dial up at home. Makes me cry whenever I need to send email from home.
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post #52 of 551
4/19/05 at 1:18am
Quote:
Originally Posted by c_mackowski
That is what I was going to do!!
Oh well, too late. Now you'll owe me royalties if you do it.

Quote:
Originally Posted by c_mackowski
I tried to look today, could not find this.... You guys work on this angle.
I'm off tomorrow and Wednesday, so I'll make some phone calls.

Quote:
Originally Posted by c_mackowski
I have 19.2k dial up at home.
I remember how cool it was when I upgraded from 2400 to 9600 and could view BBS's in COLOR! And it only cost me $400 for the modem! Man, can you young guys imagine taking 20 minutes to download one crappy 256-color nudie gif?

-Doc "Not tonight, Honey; I have a modem." Caliban
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post #53 of 551
4/19/05 at 9:46am
I was just poking around in the General Notebook thread and found a post in which someone observed that their Sonoma-based laptop has both the hard drive and the CD drive installed on the same IDE channel. That's not good. Someone else posted a graphical layout of the Intel spec and it shows 1 IDE channel and 2 SATA channels (which Dell has chosen to not include in the XPS2). Does this mean that these systems only HAVE one IDE channel?

Can someone look in Device Manager and see if their XPS2 shows the hard drive and optical drive existing on seperate IDE channels?

-Doc
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post #54 of 551
4/19/05 at 3:34pm
no worries, man...

Primary IDE Channel: Device 0: Current Xfer Mode: Ultra DMA Mode 5 [has to be the HD]

Primary IDE Channel: Device 1: Current Xfer Mode: Not Applicable [nothing attached]

Secondary IDE Channel: Device 0: Current Xfer Mode: Ultra DMA Mode 2 [has to be DVD drive]

Secondary IDE Channel: Device 1: Current Xfer Mode: Not Applicable [nothing attached]

---In other words, everything is attached normally, and we have plenty of room...

Also, the controller is listed as: Intel(R) 82801FBM Ultra ATA Storage Controllers - 2653

Finally: You don't HAVE an XPS2 to check, Doc? Why are you so invested in the project, then? Have one on order or something?

EDIT: nevermind...just looked at yer sig...when is that box coming? Or are you just at work or something and goofing off?
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post #55 of 551
4/19/05 at 5:36pm
It was just delivered to Florida today. (Took 2 days to get there with "3-5 day ground shipping." Now I have to figure out how to get it here.


-Doc
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post #56 of 551
4/24/05 at 9:11am
Just an update here. I got my 9300 and love it Suse 9.2 rocks on this!! Anyway, now that I see how the cdrom is connected, I got back to my orig. thoughts. I will be doing a pinout of the jae and will build a pcb with a female jae to laptop hard drive connector. Right now biggest item is finding a US dist. for the JAE connectors and talking them out of a few. Also need to get the laptop ide connectors. This is the direction I am moving.
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post #57 of 551
4/24/05 at 7:58pm
Great news. I should have my XPS in a couple days.
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post #58 of 551
5/2/05 at 11:57pm
Not much to update... I am still waiting on one adapter in order to do the pinout.
On another issue. I have a 9300 replacement unit. I will be sending the orig back. I made a negative mold of the cdrom. Now I will simply be able to fabricate the mounting out of fiberglass or carbon fiber for that spiffy look....
I am worried about making the PCB, the contacts on the JAE are very very small.
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post #59 of 551
5/7/05 at 8:55pm
Jeezus...this would work just fine with the UltraDrives adapter I have, except for the fact that we need a female/female JAE adapter!!! Can anyone point me to a link for this part?!?!!? OR is that why you guys are working on pinning out one yourselves? Nobody makes them, eh? Help! I'm running out of space!
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post #60 of 551
5/8/05 at 7:39am
Quote:
Originally Posted by hammermd
Jeezus...this would work just fine with the UltraDrives adapter I have, except for the fact that we need a female/female JAE adapter!!! Can anyone point me to a link for this part?!?!!? OR is that why you guys are working on pinning out one yourselves? Nobody makes them, eh? Help! I'm running out of space!
No, you need a female to male gender changer ***IF*** there is such a thing This still would not work well. The male end is in the laptop. The CDROM has a female JAE. I will be ripping off a female JAE from an old laptop drive to make the PCB. We need to find some female JAE 50 pins. I'm not going to invest much time/money on that end until I know this will work.
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