use hard drive on laptop with no extra slot.

[sauravsingh.rax]

I have ideapad 330-15arr. Currently ubuntu installed (i have a lot of important data stored in it) so what i want to dual boot windows and ubuntu. I have 1 tb hdd and will be buying 250 gb ssd. My laptop has only slot for 2.5 inch sata hdd. But i want to use both the drives ssd for OS and hdd for storage and backups (snapshots).

I preferably don't want to use my 1tb hard drive using usb because that will be so uncomfortable to connect and disconnect hard drive everytime i want to see data.

My laptop does have empty place for optical drive. I am curious if there is any safe and realible way to to plug hard drive so there is not much hassle after installation.

Also in other threads i read about stuffing the extra hard drives in a server. What is it?

 

[Solandri]

Most laptops with optical bays can take a HDD in the optical bay. But since your laptop didn't come with an optical drive, it may be missing the adapter which takes the motherboard's mini cables and converts it to a standard SATA plug. This thread seems to have the information you need.

https://forums.lenovo.com/t5/Lenovo-IdeaPad-1xx-3xx-5xx-7xx/Ideapad-330-81DE00T0US-No-Optical-Drive-Can-Add-One/td-p/4279945

As the optical bay is larger than the HDD, you'll have to figure out a way to mount it to keep the HDD from bouncing around inside. You can cut down some pieces of foam, or you can see if there's a special caddy available on eBay or Amazon for your laptop. This is a rather common mod, so companies have started selling caddies for the more popular laptop models.

https://www.amazon.com/Nimitz-Drive-Lenovo-Ideapad-Bracket/dp/B07955QWC4
https://www.ebay.com/b/Lenovo-Ideapad-Hdd-Caddy/158816/bn_7023311681
https://hddcaddy.com/en/