Slim DVD-RW for Dell Latitude C610 laptop
I’ve got a couple of Dell Latitude C610 laptops with sufficient power in the 1 GHz Pentium III Mobile processor for playing a DivX video full screen. What they are particularily great with is power consumption, running easily for 2.5 to 3 hours on a full charge, and they’ve got room for two batteries each! Obviously, this comes at a cost: the weight.
But one thing drives me bonkers: one came with a 24x CDROM drive, and the other with a flimsy 8x CDRW drive. With the omnipresence of DVDs, these are annoyingly limited for reading and writing optical media.
Option 1: Purchase an external drive. A fair option I actually considered, however it would require a fully functional USB2 or FireWire port. The laptop has only one USB 1.1 port, and the extra CardBus USB2 controller is not very reliable for intensive data transfers.
Option 2: Purchase a DVD-RW drive from Dell. Not only these drives are expensive, but also very difficult to find. Over the years, Dell changed the removable tray format, so there’s no way I could find a brand new DVD-RW drive for the ancient Latitude C600-series laptop model.
Option 3: Purchase a standard slim DVD-RW drive and replace the existing drive in the plastic caddy. I managed to find a Pioneer slim DVD-RW drive for a very reasonable price (30€ give or take) which arrived in the mail today.
It was immediately obvious that the new drive won’t fit. Its front bezel is flat and square, unlike the extruded, rounded-corners bezel of the existing drives. It was also slightly wider, only by one or two millimeters, but enough not to fit through the hole in the caddy. The bezels from the old drives didn’t match the button position, nor did the clips securing them to the drive tray.
I decided that, instead of trimming the excess from the new drive’s plastic bezel, I could file off the caddy to make room for the new drive. This was a fairly easy job and didn’t take more than 10 minutes of carefully filing the plastic, beveling the edges and cleaning everything.
So, here’s the story of modding the Dell Latitude C610 CDROM tray to fit a standard slim DVDROM drive, in pictures.
The original drive in its caddy:
Note the rounded corners of the drive bezel:
New drive on top of the old drive, removed from caddy. See how the original bezel is shorter with two millimeters at the right?
After using a file to make room for the new bezel, this is what the modded caddy looks compared to the original:
Detail on the filed corners - not an extremely pleasant result, but it’s functional:
Mounting the original connector to the new drive:
Mounting the new drive into the modded caddy - perfect fit:
Caddy fully assembled, ready to be inserted back into the laptop. Miniature screwdriver on top was a must have tool for working with the tiny screws.
Any suggestions or comments would be greatly appreciated!
