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Ultrabayslim Drive in IBM T2X


Why?

A guess the first question is "Why would you want to put an old, slow, Ultrabayslim drive into a T23?". Well, I'm not exactly doing that. This issue first presented itself when I bought a cheap Samsung CDRW/DVD combo drive off of eBay which had a generic black bezel. Since I wanted to put it into one of my T23 systems and because the Ultrabay 2000 drives have a notch in the right side of the bezel, some 'adjustments' were needed. I took an Xacto micro-saw blade and cut off the notch to match an Ultrabay 2000 device. Swapping the caddy from an Ultrabay 2000 CD-ROM drive that I was not using anymore, completed the conversion. This worked so well, that I bought another Samsung combo drive and did the same thing. At the time, I did not document what I did but after seeing a couple of threads on Thinkpads.com I decided to take some pictures the next time the opportunity arose. I did not have to wait long...

Cheap DVD±RW drive

Since the T23 has enough CPU horsepower to run a DVD burner, I looked around eBay and saw that most IBM Ultrabay 2000 DVD±RW burners were listed as Buy-it-Now auctions, running over $100. I finally found one at a low starting bid and eventually won it at $61 (all prices quoted here are with shipping included). What I got was a Panasonic UJ-820S drive and it seemed to work great with Easy CD Creator 5 in burning DVDs. So now that I knew what I was looking for, I bought two more of these drives at $51 and $42. Both were apparently pulled from Toshiba laptops since they came with a small mounting bracket at the back. I simply took off the bracket, installed the Ultrabay 2000 caddy and cut the bezels. This time instead of using an Xacto blade I used a Dremel mounted in a drill press stand.

Raymond Kawakami
San Jose, CA
E-Mail: r k a w a k a m i AT y a h o o DOT COM
Copyright 2006
Version 1.0 - Released August 8, 2006

All photos were taken by me using a Canon A10 camera and prepared for web posting using Paint Shop Pro 7. You have permission to link to this page but not to claim it as your own.