Add RAID to your Apple laptop -- for a price

Kind of an obvious hack, but if you can live life without your Apple laptop's internal optical drive on the day to day, Macenstein demonstrates using an MCE OptiBay add-on kit to pull the optical drive out of your machine and swap it out for another hard drive. The hundies invested open such possibilities as software RAID 0/1, a dedicated Windows drive, or simply extra internal storage -- but almost all of the above will take another hit on your battery, so be forewarned before you dare to crack open that fortress-like aluminum case.

[Via Macenstien and Digg]

[XGM @ Apr 29th 2007 6:58PM]

Your comment is beyond anything ive ever seen.

1 - The kit comes with a case for your DVD drive so it becomes external
2 - It dosnt need to be RAID, the title is misleading
3 - It comes with all the tools you need to install it yourself
4 - Most people buy the 160GB or 200GB on the MBP and have put wither Parallels or Boot Camp, witch cuts down on the space availble
5 - You should read the site nest time, and understand instead of pretending you know anything.

[craig @ Apr 29th 2007 8:38PM]

Considering your imagination, open-mindedness and ability to read, I'd say you were an expert on gayness yourself.

To answer your question, someone who is a heavy user of a notebook and has need for more capacity and speed than a single 160GB drive and who has no use for an internal DVD might want to do this.

[vlad.m @ Apr 29th 2007 10:58PM]

Why are you attacking my "ability to read" I think it is pretty clear what the article is about. Modifying your Apple notebook to add another hard drive in either RAID 0 or 1 and the kit allows you to use the drive externally. What I meant by losing it is simply having it externally which sort of defeats the purpose of it being a notebook. All this work, money invested, warranty void and battery drain for what? A second HDD? It is not worth it and I think I made myself clear of this in my comment! This garbage does not belong on Engadget. What angers me most is that they actually want money for this kit. The way I see it, there are 4 negatives and only one pathetic positive out of this project.

[John Doe @ Apr 29th 2007 11:30PM]

vlad.m,

Generally speaking those who call forth teh "gay" have their own issues with their sexuality. Get bent you ignorant dumbass. RAID is a damn good thing to have on a laptop. I can't tell you how many drives I've lost over the years at the office I support. An external optical drive is a perfectly good alternative if it means if you are on the road and one of the drives up and dies.

[vlad.m @ Apr 30th 2007 4:44AM]

First off, the "gay" comments are not to be taken literally but rather as an expression. For example, "That lamp is ugly" which nowadays people say "That lamp is gay", it ultimately refers to the same thing. The word "gay", in this context, does not mean homosexual but it takes on a new meaning, it refers to something negative. If you needed an explanation for this then you need to live life some more, step away from your computer and go out in the real world some and just maybe you'll pick up on these colloquialisms. Good luck!

P.S. If you are so concerned about drives failing then maybe you should consider a firewire HDD. Cheaper, easily expandable and nothing is modified / lost in the process. You people are the most unproductive I have seen apart from my 4 year old cousin.

[scott @ Apr 29th 2007 4:36PM]

what if they used 2 1.8 inch drives in that case rather than one 2.5...

100gb extra and not near as much battery eatage...

[obiwan @ Apr 30th 2007 1:26AM]

Do you suppose two of those tiny drives could take the place of the existing HD, thus leaving you with a pair of drives AND your optical? That would be swanky!

[Josh @ Apr 29th 2007 4:45PM]

Or, of course, a swanky SSD.

[iamdigitalman @ Apr 29th 2007 5:03PM]

my pismo with it's expansion bay FTW!! I can add a second HDD (or SSD), and when I am done, eject the hard drive, and HOT SWAP my optical drive back in.

and when my battery is getting low, I just swap out the optical or HDD in the expansion bay, and add my second battery. I can then remove the other battery, and swap in another one in the left side.

I miss the expantion bay in apple laptops, or else i'd be driving a MBP.

[obiwan @ Apr 30th 2007 1:23AM]

Transformers! Laptops in Disguise!

[po @ Apr 29th 2007 5:05PM]

or, a RAID-0 SSD

imagine the speed of this bad boy

[tim @ Apr 29th 2007 5:20PM]

I did this to my macbook pro some time ago, but had alot of issues with parallels and using the harddrive as a separate windows drive. The problem all stems from the fact that the Macbook pro assumes that your IDE connection is a dvd player rather then a harddrive, so it attempts to boot off of it even thought the secondary harddrive isn't bootable. I eventually got around it by cloning drives, etc...but the effort involved was herculean to my noobian brain.

I got a bootable dvd firewire drive as an addon, which works, but it won't play a dvd movie from the remote, because it's looking at the harddrive.

It's a nice hack if you need more harddrive space, but you'll have issues.

[Pabblo @ Apr 29th 2007 8:06PM]

If you did raid0 across the 2 drives, you'd have to leave that second one in there all the time. Because as soon as you ejected it, bye bye raid0 volume.

[craig @ Apr 29th 2007 8:32PM]

Since the drives aren't "ejectable" that doesn't seem to be an issue, does it?

[foo.bar @ Apr 29th 2007 11:05PM]

The fact that the optical drive uses an ATA/100 bus is not a good reason to avoid a RAID. A single notebook hard drive won't saturate an ATA/100 bus. Now, it's possible that there could be a bandwidth limitation because the ATA and SATA controllers are both on the same South Bridge chip, but you'd need to benchmark to find that out. That said, the SATA implementation in the MBP does support Native Command Queuing (NCQ), but you may or may not see any benefit from this feature:
http://www.techreport.com/reviews/2004q4/seagate-7200.7ncq/index.x?pg=13
http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/showdoc.aspx?i=2394&p=12

[craig @ Apr 29th 2007 8:43PM]

Sorry, engadget, but the MBP case is hardly fortress-like. It is quite easily damaged by a small drop. I ruined a MBP case with a 2 foot drop whereas conventional notebook cases routinely pass such tests. Just because it's metal doesn't mean it's superior.

[Harry @ Apr 29th 2007 9:21PM]

@iamdigitalman

You can exchange the battery in a Powerbook (only tested it with PB) while it is running. You got about 60 seconds to put a new one in (longer than 60 seconds and it will completely turn off. So don't wait too long.) ;-)

And a single HDD with 120 to 200 GB is good enough for me.

I would say: buy a MBP. :-P

[craig @ Apr 30th 2007 12:20PM]

Because the article clearly explains why the modification was done.

"I use up at least 20-30GB per week in the field, and it will be great to be able to work on my notebook without having an external drive chained to it."

Had you read the article, you would not have questioned why anyone would do such a thing. Instead, you were more interested in making homophobic remarks.

Just because you have no interest in high capacity and performance in a notebook doesn't mean that no one does. Photo pros, of which the author is one, run Photoshop in the field and need lots of storage. Requiring the use of an external drive is a burden for them while an external DVD is not a big deal.

[foo.bar @ Apr 29th 2007 11:05PM]

Apple documentation describing ATA and SATA interfaces in the 15- and 17-inch MBPs:
http://developer.apple.com/documentation/HardwareDrivers/Conceptual/15inMacBookPro_0610/Articles/MacBookPro.html
http://developer.apple.com/documentation/HardwareDrivers/Conceptual/17inMacBookPro_0610/Articles/17inMacBookProArch.html

[Squeeb @ Apr 30th 2007 3:39AM]

Good hack, although RAID wouldn't really be a good idea as the optical drive connector is PATA, Parrallel ATA, not SATA. So the overall speed would be bottlenecked by the PATA connection.

[craig @ Apr 29th 2007 8:30PM]

Parallel ATA is not a bottleneck for notebook drives. The different interfaces are meaningless to performance.

[craig @ Apr 30th 2007 12:25PM]

"The word "gay", in this context, does not mean homosexual but it takes on a new meaning, it refers to something negative."

Of course, because being homosexual is something negative, right vlad? You're an idiot.

"If you needed an explanation for this then you need to live life some more, step away from your computer and go out in the real world some and just maybe you'll pick up on these colloquialisms. Good luck!"

If only you could take your own advice. It's not a "colloquialism", it's a deragatory, homophibic remark made by an ignorant fool.

"P.S. If you are so concerned about drives failing then maybe you should consider a firewire HDD. "

Once again, vlad, if you'd have bothered to read the article, you'd know that the author is specifically NOT concerned about drives failing. What he IS concerned with is not having to use an external drive with his system. You're so smart.

[vlad.m @ May 1st 2007 11:48AM]

Okay you know what? Stop with that fucking shit already. I never mentioned anything about what the author is implying so stop fucking misquoting me already! Using an externa drive is not inconvenient enough to NEED to perform this modification, end of story! You will have to use the Superdrive externally anyways after the modification and although it is not used as often as the drive, it is still not worth the trouble. It is one of those things that surface every once in a while that don't deserve a second glance so drop this bullshit about me not reading the article already, it is perfectly clear in what it says!