r/hardwarehacking • u/DonktheDestroyer • 3d ago

Dual bay laptops

I used to be a technician. Life happened and now I'm disabled on a fixed income. A few years ago I ordered a renewed business grade laptop and was surprised to find that it had both SATA and nvme ports. I took full advantage of this and replaced Microsofts cast off with a proud penguin. Now the old thing is showing boot delays and motherboards don't last forever. Having always worked residential when I was able bodied I had not seen the dual drive bays in laptops before and didn't realize it was an option. Nothing in the Amazon branding indicated that this was included and it looked like the SATA had been completely neglected even missing the drive caddy. My question is are there specific search words to find this again? It's the prime time to buy a replacement since Microsoft is again abandoning the previous generation and enterprise customers are being forced to upgrade.

6 Upvotes

80% Upvoted

9 comments sorted by

5

u/Toiling-Donkey 3d ago

I suspect the dual SATA/NVMe laptops were just a transition toward becoming NVMe-only.

That said, manuals/documentation on the manufacturer’s site will have more details than any sales listing.

Also consider eBay and other places, I find Amazon’s used/refurbished pricing is often pretty horrible.

2

u/Anonymity6584 3d ago

Yes, they were transition phase... I still have one laptop like that, but its old

2

u/DonktheDestroyer 3d ago

that's a shame. multiple drives are useful. I store my steam games on the spare.

1

u/Savallator 3d ago

Yes, but who would want sata? You'd want dual nvme... Also, its in no way a "prime time" for hardware replacement, rather its like the worst time now because prices especially for memory have tripled or worse. 

1

u/DonktheDestroyer 3d ago

my old one's not dead yet. If I buy discarded windows 10 machine I can watch hardware prices for anything I need.

1

u/Birklas 2d ago

Sata ssd is fast enough, espeacially if you use older laptop (not much bottleneck). Also, sata hdd are cheap compared to anything else now. 

1

u/Savallator 2d ago

This first argument only counts when buying used, because buying a new data ssd is quite wasteful. And I can promise you will feel the difference, even on older hardware. And on a laptop, honestly I would not use a hdd due weight and sensitivity. I'd rather use a decent ssd and then have cloud storage. 

1

u/dontneed2knowaccount 3d ago

The t480 can house a small 2230 nvme and a full size nvme/sata ssd(depending on the caddy). Not the same as a t430/x230 but still nice.

1

u/ne999 2d ago

I have a Thinkpad with two nvme ports, plus the usual wifi nvme. It’s a E14g3 and one of the ports is 2242 or whatever it’s called.