Disk mounting bracket question

Hi, Lothar:

By spacers, do you mean you bought something like this? Have you see this one?

Hi,

 yes and maybe. Those "spacers" keep the disk aligned but there seems to be no way to affix it chassis. Your 2nd option seems at a first glance more suitable. Would you recommend it based on your experience?

Thanks,

   Lothar

I have no experience with your particular case, but I'm sure I'd have no problem making it fit.

Okay. I was just wondering if DELL offers the right solution somewhere. After all one can order the T3400 with four disks and so the right bracket should be available - if not from Dell then from Dell's supplier. All I want to know is the right part number/model etc. (I guess I could open a service case for this but it felt like it was a very trivial question )

Thanks,

Lothar

Have you tried Dell Spare Parts?  1-800-357-3355.

Ron

Hi,

  yes but they did not help me much. They only gave me a link to Startech disk mounting brackets adapter kit which kind of works but there is no way to stabilize it in (screw it on) the slot properly. I did read the T3400 manual and it shows the depiction of an adapter plus an enclosure that fits the disk. How to get the enclosure seems to be unknown. In the meantime I found several vendors that offer solutions of some sort but I thought Dell should be able to tell me what *they* use when the assemble a system.

Well, I finally mounted a disk in the free 3.25 slot with some effort and encounter the next problem that it is not recognized. I suspect this is not the right forum to ask for help with this? Since this is  a hardware forum, let me ask you this: Are there any known issues with Seagate ST310000528AS firmware CC37 (1TB disk)? There is however one funny observation: It seems to be recognized when I unplug the CDROM Sata cable and use the very same socket for this disk. None of the others (4 grouped together) worked! Hmm. Not that I found a specific problem on the Dell firmware site but there were listed problems with Seagate disks that apparently won't start and are not found by the system.

Any advice is appreciated.

Lothar

Yes you are exactly right. They were turned off. I did find it out before I got your mail. I did use F12 though and select "Setup System". According to the "factory default" they should be turned on but they were not. Possibly not terribly important, but I took the opportunity to upgrade the BIOS from A05 to A09. 

About the adapter kit that allows one to mount a 3.5 disk in a 5.25" slot, there are solutions on the web and I will probably get a few (they  are quite cheap) and see which one works the best.

Thanks RoHe. You're the Best.

:emotion-21:

Here is the answer I had hoped to get: ( It took me about 6 months!)

Dell spare parts did not help me much. Dell does have (or had?!) standard Startek Disk mounting brackets. I did get one of those. I could figure out how to attach the braket to the disk but I could not securely affix the drive+brackets into the 5.25" slot. In particular the left side would hang essentially loose. It appeared to me early on and this is why I sent mail to the forum, that a spcial adapter is needed that would fit into the rail (if you will) on the left side of the housing.

After several months of mulling over this, I found KingWin KF-1000-BK "Internal 3.25" tray less hot swap rack" (as they called it) Price ~$20 after $5 discount. It has the right 5.25" size and allows you to insert a 3.5" disk (in my case a Seagate 2Tb SATA) disk effortlessly.

Not entirely surprising was that it had the same problem: The left side was loose and I did not want it to rest on the card reader below. So I unmounted the DVD drive on top to see how it was secured and found that it had simply 2 screws inserted as spacers. The screws don't screw in all the way but have themselves a spacer between the thread and the head which glides easily on the "rail". If you wonder where to get those screws, you might find spare screws in the T3400 in the black panel (reverse side) that you do have to remove in order to gain access to the disks in the front. 

In the end all I needed was a bracket (the cheaper StarTech might have worked as well) and those two screws and of course the *knowledge* how to do it. 

Given my experience with it, I do recommend the King Win KF-1000-BK set as it has everything in it (except those two special screws): It includes a SATA cable, a power cable adapter, instructions and keys to look the hot swap mechanism. That said, there are likely many other fine disk mounting sets out there.

Good luck.

Thanks for all the details. Hopefully that information will be helpful to someone else.