SSD in place of ODD using HDD Caddy

[krunal_g]

I wan to upgrade my laptop with 120/240 GB SSD (as a boot drive). I was thinking of adding them in place of Optical Disk Drive using HDD Caddy. So I search around a bit about that and in many answers in this forum I found that it is more advisable to add SSD in place of HDD and put HDD in place of ODD (reason for this was that SATA port for ODD is SATA II).

Questions:

1. Can I use SSD(as boot drive) in place of ODD if SATA port is SATA III (6Gbps)?

2. Does my laptop (HP 15-r0007tx) has SATA III port for ODD drive?

3. And if I had to use HDD in place of ODD, Will I be able to boot from that HDD(planning to have Windows on HDD and Linux on SSD)?

Thanks.

[Huffer]

Nice idea but reality is going to intervene. You have, however, done an admirable job of figuring out the questions to ask but the answers are not favorable to the plan. A disk in an optical caddy is going to be slower as optical drives do not need SATA-III speed and optical drive mini-SATA ports are SATA-II at best. Also a drive in such a caddy will not be bootable. 

So yes, put the SSD in the main bay so it can stretch its legs and run full speed. When you put the HDD in the ODD caddy it will be pure storage. Skillful manipulation of the Linux bootloader may let you run Linux on the SSD and Windows on the HDD in the ODD. You would technically put the bootloader on the SSD, but it would hand off the Windows installation on the HDD in the ODD. In other word set GRUB up to be at the root of the SSD. You will have a choice of Linux or Windows at bootup. 

[krunal_g]

Thanks for quick reply. Back then I hadn't accepted your answer as solution because I suspected this.

So, I had finally replaced HDD with SSD and put HDD inplace of Optical Disk Drive(ODD). I hadn't install any OS on SSD yet. And when I booted the laptop surprisingly it booted Ubuntu which was installed on HDD. So I think you would like to correct your stand on not able to boot from HDD (thats placed inplace of ODD). And you said that ODD SATA port is not SATA-III. But it was showing as SATA-III. I checked it using CPU-Z and using terminal on Ubuntu.

If I had known that ODD port is SATA-III, I wouldn't need to open up my laptop and motherboard to replace that HDD. I would have placed SSD inplace of ODD. That would have saved lot of time and effort.

[Huffer]

If this is the case then your model is unique somehow as what I said has been tested and reported many times but I can't hope to know all the details of all the models. Enjoy.