For those of us that still use laptops over tablets and smart phones, a ingenious device has been made that will allow you to add an additional HDD to your laptop by replacing the optical drive. This is a very simple and straight forward process that can be done in just a few minutes. Remove your optcal drive, Place your HDD in the new caddy and tighten the side screws,
Then reverse your steps to install, I do need to mention that there is a small removable screw tab that needs to be removed from the tail end of the optical drive and attached to the caddy. After everything is installed and your battery is installed, boot up and Now this caddy did fit just a tad bit tight and caused the bottom of the laptop case to bulge a bit, but it was not excessive and I am using said machine at this moment.
I have a similar setup. I don't use optical drives for much but my kit came with an eSATA cable so I can use my DVD drive as an external drive. To me, having an extra 2TB in the laptop was far more critical than having in integrated optical drive.
With an external drive, but the only software I have installed with the optical drive is Windows. Most software today is downloaded as an exe. file due to the reduced cost of selling software on any kind of optical disk
