Over on Lenovo’s Inside the Box blog, the Lenovo team has posted a video of just what is entailed on swapping devices in the ThinkPad X300 bay. As they point out, it’s not an ultrabay like in past IBM/Lenovo ThinkPads, and it’s not meant to have devices swapped in and out of all that often, but going by the video, it’s still fairly easy to do.
Going the older Ultrabay route would have meant adding thickness to the X300, something they say they don’t want to do. You could swap an optical drive for an extra battery, etc. (I would leave the extra battery in and just do the USB drive thing).;
They also answer several questions:
Why only 1.2GHz Ultra Low Volt Processors? Don’t forget, the magic that makes the ThinkPad X300 possible is a new chip package from Intel which has reduced height compared to other processors. It is only available in one processor speed at this time. And yes, we chose ULV processors for maximum battery life.
What size is the keyboard? This keyboard is a full T Series sized keyboard and not an X Series sized keyboard.
Does the ability to swap the optical drive out of the bay mean that I can use a hard disk drive in the bay for more storage? No. The bay itself is what I believe to be the industry’s first 7mm thick optical drive. Even if we did provide a caddy for a hard disk, mobile hard disks are too thick to physically fit.
Why no docking connector? I’m going to defer this one as I plan to write a larger post on docking in the near future. But a partial answer is that adding a docking connector would have added to thickness significantly.