Introduction

I've ordered stuff from eBay past 4 years or so. Reading horror stories of some other users I consider myself lucky with eBay until now. Between 50 and 100 orders I've placed, I haven't had to send back basically none of the packages I received. It seems I ran out of luck this year.

I've got couple of Lenovo Thinkpad T420's here. The neat thing about T420 is that you can remove the optical drive and replace it with hard disk caddy since they both have SATA interfaces. If you're mainly running on SSD it it pretty nice to have HDD as a second storage device in the place of CD-ROM.

The funny thing is that I had ordered a HDD caddy for my T410 year or two ago and I knew what perfect fit means in this case.

First try

Foolishly I was looking for the best price I could get for T420 caddy. So I placed an order for two of these caddies from user single2000 based in Hong Kong.

These caddies were of course NOT perfect fit for my T420. Here on the left you can see the caddy I had ordered year or two ago and on the right you can see the one I ordered from single2000.

What I think is that these caddies were designed for T420s where s stands for slim. After explaining in several messages that please could you swap them for items of proper height I gave up and sent the items back. I paid $14.18 ≃ 10 EUR which was fully refunded. I paid 6-7€ for shipping back the caddies.

Second try

I doubled the price and placed order for this which seems according to the item description to look like the caddy I already had which was a perfect fit.

The item description was again incorrect. Instead they sent me the generic caddy:

When I sent them the picture the seller u-shoppingmagic started to explain how I have to remove the bezel so it would fit. WTF?!

Third try

Third time I paid about the same price but I ordered the caddies from Amazon where they actually have several sharp pictures of the product and you can see it is the right one.

Conclusion

eBay is great if there is enough room for error. If you need a precise piece of hardware you might want to choose in favor of Amazon, DealExtreme or make sure there are several pictures of the product and there is no way to misinterpret the item description. I wasted two months on the chinese suppliers on eBay and I got the right ones from Amazon in 3-4 days.