I acquired a few HP ProBook 4415s laptops which had been scrapped, and decided to rebuild them into working machines. I’ve been needing a new personal/media laptop for a bit, and these are capable little machines with an HDMI output for connecting to my home theatre system.

While cruising eBay for missing trim panels I stumbled across something I’d never seen before – an extremely easy way to add a second hard drive or SSD to any laptop currently fitted with an optical drive: optical drive adapter caddies

Remove your existing CD drive, drop your new hard drive into this caddy and slide it in where the optical drive used to go. It’s that easy – expanded capacity. Laptop surgery isn’t always for the faint of heart, and this also offers a good way for a road warrior to expand capacity or add a backup drive. Since optical media is really falling by the wayside, unless you watch a lot of disc-based movies on your laptop it’s unlikely you’d miss the optical drive.

I searched around some more, and it looks like these adapters are available for most relatively recent and popular laptop models. I’ll probably buy one for the next time one of my laptop hard drives needs to be upgraded.