Recently the 3.5” internal drive in my Dell XPS One 2720 “all in one” desktop PC failed. Not having redundant drives is one of the trade offs when using an “all in one” style computer. Aside from this it has been a fantastic space saving desktop PC over the years. Additionally I back my data daily so I wasn’t concerned about losing any data.
Since I was going to the effort of replacing the drive I decided to swap out the old 3.5” Western Digital 7500 rpm mechanical drive with a significantly higher performing Samsung EVO 870 SSD. The PC was originally designed for a 3.5” drive so the new 2.5” would fit too loosely in the space intended for the drive. Technically I could just leave the new drive loose in the drive bay since I don’t move the PC around much but it’s really not a good idea to have loose parts in a PC. So I solved my challenge by using the Sabrent 2.5” to 3.5” Internal Hard Drive Mounting Bracket.
Sabrent 2.5” to 3.5” Mounting Bracket
The Sabrent 2.5” to 3.5” Drive Bracket is an ingenious bit of hardware. It is designed to hold 2 SSD drives in the space of one 3.5” internal drive and comes with all the mounting screws for both drives. However, in my situation I only installed one drive due to the hardware limitation of my PC. The XPS One 2720 has one MSATA SSD installed on motherboard and then accommodates one data drive. Once I removed the old 3.5” drive and installed the new 2.5” drive in the Sabrent bracket it was ready for installation back in my PC.
Afterwards I just needed to connect the internal SATA cable and put the rear cover back on my PC.
As you can see in the photo below the new drive carrier fits perfectly in the original 3.5” drive bay while the new 2.5” drive rests securely in the middle and best of all no loose parts. Thanks for reading!
