Inserting an SSD into the Defunct DVD Drive Slot in a Laptop

Just remove your old or non working optical drive and add more storage space and performance to your system by using SSD Hard Drive alongwith a SATA Caddy Adapter

Do you have an old laptop which is running out of speed, space, and performance? Upgrading the existing HDD  to SSD may solve your problem to some extent. But the problem is that we have only one SATA drive slot in most of the laptops. However, there is one solution which is very simple to implement---replace your optical drive with a brand new SSD drive. Yes, you read it right, in the market or via online stores you can easily get the SSD SATA caddy disk adapter that costs between Rs. 600 to Rs 900.

Here today in this tutorial we going to show you how to replace a DVD drive with an SSD drive.

Prerequisites:

• An SSD SATA Caddy Adapter
• SSD drive (here we are using Samsung 850 EVO 250GB SSD)

What you get in the caddy the box:

• Die-cast aluminum caddy
• Four (4) drive screws

Note: Hard drive / SSD not included. The drive you can use is a 2.5" SATA hard drive or SSD with a maximum height of 9.5mm. 

STEP 1

Turn laptop power "off” and turn the laptop over so you can access the bottom of the laptop. At the back side of the optical drive, you will see a screw.

STEP2

Most of the laptop has only one screw to held in the DVD drive. Just loosen that screw to remove the Optical DVD drive. Some Laptops screw is hidden under the bottom covers, so please check your laptop manual before removing the optical drive.

STEP 3

After removing the screw, just pull optical drive out.

STEP 4

Now from your DVD drive, remove the faceplate / bezel from optical drive by pressing it gently by using your screwdriver.  Once it removes, attach it to the faceplate / bezel to the drive caddy.

STEP 5

Now at the back side of the optical drive tray, you will see a small metal bracket that is used to held on the drive to the laptop. Remove that and attach it to the drive caddy.

Step 6

Loosen the screws at the side of the caddy to insert a hard drive or SSD into drive caddy. Just insert and push softly to insert the male SATA connector of SSD to the caddy female connector.

STEP 7

Tight the four side screws of Caddy to hold the SSD firmly.  Now attach the removed faceplate/bezel to the caddy’s front and insert it in a laptop. Screw it from the back side and power on the laptop.

Step 8

If you OS is unable to recognize the SDD, here are some things you can do:

1. Update your BIOS Laptop
2. From Windows Disk Management, find out the SSD drive partition, format and mount it.

How the system performed

After upgrading it, we had installed a Windows 7 OS in our pre-installed HDD drive as well as in newly installed Samsung SSD. The upgrade experience was so good that a normal person can do it easily.  Also, the boot time as compared to HDD drive is almost half in SSD. Even the heavy apps such Photoshop launch nearly instantaneously. Previously our Windows experience score was 5.9 with HDD but after pushing SSD inside the laptop it goes to 7.9.  The HDD took 22 seconds to boot the OS whereas the booted the Window 7 in 11.5 seconds. Really this is a huge difference.

Related articles:

How to migrate your data using Samsung data migration software (Link)