How to build your own Ultrabay drive

ATTENTION!

No warranty of any kind is given for the correctness of the following instructions. Following them can damage your machine. Proceed at your own risk.

NOTE!

This article is written with UltraBay 2000 drives in mind. But should be appliable for UltraSlimBay and other kinds of UltraBay devices as well.

Optical UltraBay drives like CD-ROM and DVD drives or burners are usually a bit more expensive than their non-IBM counterparts. Additionally more modern technologies are not available for discontinued UltraBay standards. A solution to this annoyance is to take a standard slim form factor notebook drive and turn it into an UltraBay drive yourself.

The Basics

The "big secret" about UltraBay drives is that basically they are just standard slim form factor notebook drives equipped with an UltraBay frame. This frame is just a mechanical addition with an integrated connector adapter.

As curious people found, the inner connector of an UltraBay frame is nothing more than a standard interface for such drives. Hence, it is generally possible to disassemble an old UltraBay drive and attach the frame to a newer or better one.

There are, however, some things to consider...

The Limitations

Even though these slim form factor drives seem to have a standard form factor at first look, it turns out that there are marginal mechanical differences. This makes it hard if at all possible to know beforehand if the UltraBay frame from your old drive will perfectly fit onto the new one. The fact is that different UltraBay drives even for the same UltraBay standard have frames with different mechanical characteristics. Small differences can sometimes be adjusted by modifying parts of the frame, but this is of course not the nicest solution.

The most varying part is the Blending, which is usually not compatible even among drives of the same manufacturer. The position of the eject button, the drive LED, the emergency eject hole and the way the blending is attached to the drive all vary a lot. Do precise research before you buy anything. One solution here is to keep the original blending of the drive, since the UltraBay blending is independent from the rest of the frame. The disadvantage is an optical one: the standard blendings are usually flat whereas the UltraBay blendings usually are a bit thicker at the top and thinner at the bottom. Also, for some UltraBay standards you would have to cut out the lower right edge of the blending, since the standard drive blendings are usually rectangle shaped.

UltraBay 2000

The UltraBay 2000 frame consists of four parts: Front bezel, left wing, right wing and the back plate containing the connector interface.

The left and right parts are attached with little screws in holes which are at standardised positions and should usually fit among all drives. However, the actual drives show tiny variations in width, which are leveraged by the left and right parts. Hence these can be a bit thicker or thinner (fractions of 1mm). Putting a somewhat wide frame part onto a somewhat wide drive might result in an UltraBay drive that doesn't fit into the bay at all because it's just a tiny little bit too wide. This can be dealt with e.g. by sanding one of the side frame parts, but it's better if all components fit correctly in the first place. Also, the side frames have hatches fitting into the holes in the back part. Among frames these hatches vary in thickness and length and hence, again, might not fit easily. Again, they can be adjusted by cutting them a bit.

UltraBay 2000 drives and compatible alternative drives

UltraBay drive	IBM Part-Nr.	actual drive	compatible drive	needed steps to make fitting
24x CD-ROM drive	...	TEAC CD-224E	...	...
8x DVD drive	27L3447	Matsushita SR-8175-M	...	...
8x DVD drive	08K9648	Matsushita SR-8176-M	...	...
8x Multi-Burner	22P7015	Panasonic UJ-840	NEC 8X SLIM DVD ND-6650	Eschewing the Ultrabay 2000 bezel, a small section needs to be cut out of the lower right corner of the original front bezel. This can be removed from the drive for this purpose; the other Ultrabay parts screw directly into the drive which fits without further modifications.