Adding A Second Hard Drive To My Dell Laptop

I have a Dell Inspiron 600m laptop and I currently use Windows XP as the base Operating System with Ubuntu (GNU/Linux) running in a Virtual Machine (VMWare) on top of it.  This generally works really well... but I want to natively run Linux (instead of hosting it inside a VM) and I'm not crazy about the idea of partitioning my primary hard disk.

So what to do?

Dell offers a "2nd Hard Drive Module" to overcome this.  It is a replacement for the default CD tray that sits in the side of the laptop.  It fits in the same slot as the CD tray but inside it has an IDE adapter and hard drive mounting brackets.  This lets you use any 2.5" IDE Hard Drive as a second disk in your laptop... very cool.

I went with a Hitachi Travelstar E7K80 drive to put inside it (7200 RPM, 80 gig).



note: the 2nd Hard Drive Module" is horribly expensive from Dell directly but I picked one up on eBay for under 50 bucks