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UltraBay is originally IBM's name for the swappable drive bay in the 
Starting in 2014, Lenovo changed the design of the ThinkPad bay adapter and dropped the "UltraBay" terminology from use. What remained (in the ThinkPad W540 product) was an option for a removable Serial ATA (SATA) "Caddy" accessory which, with a screw driver, allowed the optical drive to be replaced with a second 2.5 inch SATA storage device. Battery expansion in the Caddy Bay was no longer offered, and earlier hot-swap functionality was essentially rendered difficult if not impossible.
UltraBay is originally IBM's name for the swappable drive bay in the ThinkPad
ThinkPad is a line of business-oriented laptop computers and tablets designed, developed and marketed by Lenovo, and formerly by IBM until 2005, when IBM's PC business was acquired by Lenovo. ThinkPads have a distinct black, boxy design la ...
range of laptop computer
A laptop, laptop computer, or notebook computer is a small, portable personal computer (PC) with a screen and alphanumeric keyboard. Laptops typically have a clam shell form factor with the screen mounted on the inside of the upper l ...
s. When the ThinkPad product line was sold to Lenovo
Lenovo Group Limited, often shortened to Lenovo ( , ), is a Chinese multinational technology company specializing in designing, manufacturing, and marketing consumer electronics, personal computers, software, business solutions, and related se ...
, the concept and the name stayed. Furthermore, it is used in some of Lenovo's own IdeaPad Y Series
The IdeaPad Y series was a consumer range of laptops produced by Lenovo, first announced in 2008. They are marketed as premium high performance laptops for multimedia and gaming, as part of the IdeaPad line. The most significant differences from ...
laptops.
Introduced with the ThinkPad 750 series in 1995, this technology has gone through redesigns with almost every new generation of ThinkPad, which may lead to confusion. The following table gives an overview of the different UltraBay types, in which models they occurred and which drives are available for them. Note that the optical drive bay in G series and R40e series ThinkPads is not an UltraBay in that the drives are fixed and not removable. It is however, mechanically, an UltraBay 2000-device without the surrounding "caddy".
On the media side different UltraBays relate to the form factor of the drives they accept; Some machines can accept UltraBay devices up to 12.5 mm thick, whereas others are limited to devices no more than 9.5 mm thick.
The IdeaPad
IdeaPad (stylized as IDEAPΛD and formerly ideapad) is a line of consumer-oriented laptop computers designed, developed and marketed by Lenovo. The IdeaPad mainly competes against computers such as Acer's Aspire, Dell's Inspiron and XPS, HP ...
Y400 and Y500 laptops have an UltraBay slot which can be swapped for another hard drive
A hard disk drive (HDD), hard disk, hard drive, or fixed disk is an electro-mechanical data storage device that stores and retrieves digital data using magnetic storage with one or more rigid rapidly rotating platters coated with magne ...
, another fan or another Nvidia GT650M (or GT750M)http://shop.lenovo.com/us/laptops/ideapad/y-series/y500 GPU which will work in SLI with the system's primary video card for increased graphics performance. Existing orders for the UltraBay Y500 DVD Burner (no built in optical drive) were cancelled in early June, 2013.
Starting in 2014, Lenovo changed the design of the ThinkPad bay adapter and dropped the "UltraBay" terminology from use. What remained (in the ThinkPad W540 product) was an option for a removable Serial ATA (SATA) "Caddy" accessory which, with a screw driver, allowed the optical drive to be replaced with a second 2.5 inch SATA storage device. Battery expansion in the Caddy Bay was no longer offered, and earlier hot-swap functionality was essentially rendered difficult if not impossible.
Nomenclature
See also
*Disk enclosure
A disk enclosure is a specialized casing designed to hold and power disk drives while providing a mechanism to allow them to communicate to one or more separate computers.
Drive enclosures provide power to the drives therein and convert the da ...
* Caddy (hardware)
References