cancel
Showing results for 
Search instead for 
Did you mean: 

GL551J -EH71 OD / hard drive caddy write up

nettto
Level 7
I searched for information and didn't find anything for my particular model GL551J -EH71 prior to doing this. I got this caddy from ebay, it's 9.5mm thick and I hoped it would work ok since it said it was compatible with other Asus models:
http://www.ebay.com/itm/New-2nd-SATA-Hard-Drive-SSD-HDD-Caddy-ASUS-N550JV-N750JV-re-GU71N-UJ8C2-/290...

I did not try to remove the face plate from the dvd drive and it didn't look like the tabs on the face plate would line up anyways so I needed a way to remove the caddy when I want to change out drives. I am not swapping out the drives frequently, I had an old drive I wanted to try setting this up with. Once you get the caddy in, its hard to get out without the face place to pull on, so I made a handle from a picture hanger, which I modified with a dremel tool and used two 1/8" diameter x 1 1/2" screws. The picture frame hanger was a good match for a handle because the dimensions were pretty close to what I needed and the metal was easy to file down with the dremel tool. I made the screw holes bigger with a drill bit & dremel. The picture hanger came in a pack of three, which was good because I trimmed too much on the first one.

I am probably going to take the handle off and put some black shrink tubing and black paint. Red rectangle in the 4th photo shows the screw heads. The drive caddy comes with a black spacer that would go there but because of the screws I didn't use it.

The 5th photo red rectangle shows where I used a pair of pliers to pull the caddy out (test fit) prior to the handle.

It's not the prettiest job but the drive caddy works great, the handle does not protrude out the side of the laptop so I am happy. This write-up is not the prettiest either but after resizing and re-re changing the file types (jpg only for the forum), I am done for now 😛 Any constructive feed back is welcome :cool:
5,578 Views
0 REPLIES 0