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| Figure 1: Top view. There's a small green power LED at the right edge and a standard Ultrabay Slim connector that plugs into the drive. The two plastic arms each have holes in them which match an optical drive's screw holes. These holes are not normally used as the slim optical drives do not rely upon any caddy to adapt the drive to the Ultrabay Slim bay. Four screws were included with the adapter kit, although you only need two of them to attach the adapter. The eBay auction also shows this adapter being used with an Ultrabay Slim hard drive adapter but in that case, the screws can't be used since there's no holes. I have not yet tried using the HD adapter because of power issues when connecting a hard drive to a USB port. Typically a standard notebook hard drive will need more than the 500mA that the USB port is rated for. |
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| Figure 2: Bottom view. The label indicates that the adapter can accept a 5V 1A center-positive supply which is not included, nor according to the eBay auction description, is needed. Without taking apart the adapter, I don't know how the power jack is wired into the Ultrabay interface, so for now, I'm following the supplied directions. |
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| Figure 3: Rear view. The back panel of the adapter contains the Mini-B USB connector and coaxial power jack. |
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| Figure 4: Connector view. Here's a close-up of the two connectors. It appears to be a standard Mini-B USB jack. A Mini-B to Type A USB cable is supplied with the kit. I haven't sized the power jack to know what kind of plug would fit. |
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| Figure 5: Here's what it looks like when the adapter is mounted to a standard Ultrabay Slim optical drive. View from the top... |
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| Figure 6: ...and the bottom. This particular DVD drive had a plastic film over one of the screw holes but firmly pushing in the screw was enough to break the plastic. |
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| Figure 7: Here's the adapter connected to a T41. The supplied USB cable is about 40" long so you have some flexibility where you position the optical drive. |
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| Figure 8: Booting the T41, without any hard drive or Ultrabay device installed, the DVD drive connected to the USB port starts to read as seen here by the green LED on the front bezel. |
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| Figure 9: I thought about looking into the BIOS Boot menu first to see if the USB-attached optical drive was detected, but it doesn't appear to be in the list. Hmmm, at this point I'm starting to wonder if this adapter is going to work... |
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| Figure 10: However, I re-booted the system and crossed my fingers. Hey, there's the PC Doctor startup menu! So I guess it's working after all. |
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| Figure 11: And here's the final result. The data transfer seems is noticeably slower then when the same optical drive is installed in the Ultrabay. The USB adapter is supposed to work at 2.0 speeds but I'm not sure if the T41 I'm using has a problem with the USB ports (it's also has a loose GPU). I selected this particular T41 as I wasn't sure about what would happen to a system when connecting this adapter. Next test will be to attach this adapter to a Windows system and see how it is handled. That will be in Part II of this report. |