OCZ Vertex 3 Mis-Fit in W510/520 Primary Drive Bay

[Devhack]

This issue has been raised on the OCZ forums and with their tech support dept.

How are owners of W510's and W520's mounting the new OCZ Vertex 3 drives in the primary drive bay?

The Vertex 3 2.5-inch 240G that I just rec'd is apparently slightly larger in its width than the Vertex 2 that I have. This became evident when I attempted to place it in the standard 2.5-inch primary drive bay caddy of a Lenovo W520 (same holds for my colleague's W510, which is the same physical laptop as the 520).

I have photos, but don't see a way to upload them yet..

A close examination of the Vertex 3 casing when placed in the drive caddy indicates that it is wider at its connection end than at the other end, so much so, that the "bowing out" of the flange at the connection end of the caddy permits only 3 of the 4 the drive mounting screws to be used and results in the caddy flange protruding outwards. All sorts of other HDD's and the Vertex 2 fit perfectly in the caddy; the Vertex 3 does not. 

The Lenovo mounting system appears to be important for a number of reasons. Th caddy appears to be important; via the 4 screws attaching it to the drive, it appears to ground out the drive with the laptop via contact between its bare metal external bottom with 2 metal clips inside the laptop drive bay. The rubber rails act as shock absorbers, and along with the caddy, provide a proper fit in the drive bay.

Workarounds:
1) Use only 3 of the 4 screws & carefully attach the Lenovo rubber shock absorbers to the drive/tray assemply; it's a snug fit in the bay, but it may be stressing the drive and the laptop connection to it..
2) At the connection end of the tray, cut/snip the metal tray flange to allow the flange (where the 4th screw cannot be inserted) to separate from the rest of the tray, possibly even removing the metal flange where the screw would be inserted.
3) Don't use the drive tray and risk both the absence of grounding and a fit so loose that it could result in disengaging the drive from the laptop.

4) Use a Lenovo, OCZ or 3rd party caddy that I have not been able to find.

What other Thinkpads use the same caddy as the W510/520, and are thus affected by this issue?

Do all of OCZ's Vertex 3 drive models suffer from this same abnormal dimensioning? (Already posed to OCZ; they are looking into it, but technically, the increase in size of the V3 drive I have is within industry specs for 2.5 inch drives.)

Can tech support or anyone else confirm this problem and suggest other workarounds?

Thanks.

[Q-Ball]

T510 and T520 would then by extension have the same issue (same physical chassis as the W510 and W520).

Can't confirm it, though- a Vertex 3 is not in my near future.

[shashu]

Hi, I have ordered a 120gb Vertex 3 - I'm assuming it is the same size as the 240gb drive and is also affected by this issue.  Which workaround have you gone with for now?  - Do you have the drive working in the W520?  Have you contacted Lenovo tech support about the issue?

[Devhack]

I have a V3 240G installed, up and running Win7 in a W520.

I cut a 1" notch out of the drive caddy, effectively removing one of the two mounting screw holes nearest the connection end of the drive, which allows the drive to rest in the caddy without stressing it or the caddy. Only 3 of 4 mounting screws used.

This also allows the caddy and rubber bumpers to be used in the drive bay without any squeezing or looseness.

Another W520 user claims that he managed to squeeze the V3 into the caddy as-is. I couldn't.

[shashu]

Thanks.   Photos would be great   In the meantime I suppose I'll just have to wait until my Vertex 3 (and W520) arrive.

[liucougar]

I managed to squeeze in the SSD as is

but I am having trouble to boot a windows 7 I installed to the SSD myself: 0x0000007B BSOD on first boot of win 7

how did you manage to have a windows 7 on the new SSD?

I tried to restore from the recovery DVD I burned before I replaced the hardrive with the SSD, but it could not do the recovery complaining "cannot find recovery.ini file"

[mrmelp]

I had the same problem. Use a generic Win7 Pro cd (assuming that's what came on your laptop) and use the CD key under the battery. If you have trouble with BSOD or black screens during install, you'll have to load the Intel RST driver on the W520 support page (run the exe, it extracts a bunch of stuff, put all that stuff on a flash drive and plug it in during the Windows install) when it asks you to pick which drive to install Windows on. It might give you an error about the driver being unsigned, but it still worked for me.

Has anyone been able to get their Vertex 3 to run at 6Gbps? Mine seems to run at 6Gbps for the first minute or two after boot (according to the RST screen) and then it drops down to 3Gbps. Any suggestions?

[Devhack]

See the following TweakTown article that corroborates the fit problem and the apparent but not yet confirmed OCZ policy of replacing the initially oversize V3 drives with V3 drives in new casings that will fit properly in Lenovo Thinkpads.

http://www.tweaktown.com/articles/40...ter/index.html

Waiting to hear official word from OCZ.