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I am looking to install a hard drive caddy into the optical drive hole of a future consumer-level laptop (not mac). After combing over many hard drive caddies online in search of compatability with laptop models that fit my requirements, I noticed that most "modern" hard drive caddies look the same. Obviously I need to get a laptop with a tray loading optical drive in order to install a hard drive caddy. Based on my logic, I believe that all tray load optical drives should be universally compatable, hence hard drive caddies should behave similarly. I don't believe that laptop makers are making their own proprietary tray load optical drives so universal compatability would make sense. I'm more of a desktop hardware guy so my logic stems from that "genre."

Can anybody confirm my theory, or do I have my head where the sun dont shine?

Wow, apparently there's not much expertise on this topic out there. Well I've been doing some research of my own (ie taking the optical drives out of every laptop I can get my hands on in the past few days) and I've noticed that there are actually 2 different optical drives thicknesses out there. 9.5mm and 12.5mm. Other than that difference, all the drives I came across looked mostly the same, ie a hard drive caddy would fit into any of them as long as it was the correct thickness.

Every tray loading laptop optical drive that I've seen in the past several years has been exactly the same. They only differ by the face plate attached.