Peter Seale's weblog

Friday, December 02, 2011 1:17:40 AM UTC 

This one’s for the search engines, folks, but also for those of you who have the same assigned corporate laptop I have. Allegedly.

As far as I can tell, and from what I’ve found on this forum thread, the Dell E5420 (or as my coworkers say, the “Leapfrog Laptop”) can support a second internal hard drive through the DVD drive bay.

From my detailed investigative journalism, I’ve found two places selling hard drive caddies (caddys? caddyes? cadds?):

• Shady-looking website selling a drive caddy for $45
• eBay (shady) listing selling a drive caddy for $20

It’s important that I mention a few potential problems:

• You’re going to have to use a screwdriver to open your laptop and exchange the bay drives. They are not hot-swappable. (I’m perfectly okay with this)
• The custom drive caddy is not designed for the E5420 and won’t line up flush with the laptop. As they point out in the thread, allegedly you can harvest your CD drive faceplate and re-use it. Allegedly.
• The whole idea of buying third-party electronics for $20 from small internet vendors and installing them in the very heart of your primary work machine is unnerving. (Even so, I’m okay with this.)

If I ever pull the trigger and buy one of these, I should probably post an update.

As a final point, let me say that you can buy secondhand/refurbished/possibly “hot” docking stations for the Leapfrog Laptops for ~$100ish. They’re a good investment to haul to your work site, or for home. I’m a big proponent of true dual+ monitor setups. And having tried, hate working with non-docked laptops.

Note Dell has changed up their docking stations, so your old docking station won’t work anymore (those old ones can be found online for as low as ~$20). On the plus side, the new docking stations (E-Port) have dual-DVI output. And if there’s something I hate worse than using a laptop as it was intended, it’s straining my eyes trying to read blurry ClearType text over an analog signal (i.e. VGA cables). The old docking station had one DVI and one VGA (what I now know as “VGA: the eye killer”) port. Ask me about my pixel-free weekend sometime.