I picked up an Alienware M14x laptop not too long ago. I never use optical media - so I re-purposed the optical bay to hold a hard drive. I took the original 500GB Seagate SATA drive and put it in this secondary bay, and then upgraded the primary HDD bay with an SSD drive using one of these. You can read more about the process with pics, etc. at notebookreview.com.
Shortly after doing this I experienced startup problems with my M14x. It would take a long time to boot, usually hanging for a very long time at "Loading Windows". It wasn't every time - but more often than not I would have to forcefully power the laptop off and try to get it to boot again.
Some posters on the notebookreview.com forums believe there are issues running SATA 3Gbps speeds on the secondary SATA connector. I did a little digging around and it looks like Seagate has a jumper on this particular drive that forces SATA 1.5Gbps speeds. More information can be found at seagate.com. See section 3.2 for a picture.
I didn't have any "mini" jumpers, so I took a standard-sized jumper, tweaked it with a pair of needle-nose pliars, and jammed it in there. Since then, I've booted successfully 10 out of 10 times. Your mileage may vary.
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