MCE's OptiBay exchanges unibody MacBook optical drive for HDD
By Darren Murph 
posted February 23rd 2009 8:54PM
posted February 23rd 2009 8:54PM
As we've seen with the MacBook Air, Apple clearly feels there are a select group of you out there who can live without an optical drive on your laptop. Now, MCE is giving you unibody MacBook and MacBook Pro owners a similar option. The OptiBay is essentially a second hard drive that is installed internally in place of the optical disc drive, giving MB and MBP users the ability to vastly increase their storage space or tap into a RAID setup. The company has announced that said solution is shipping today to those interested, with options including 250GB, 320GB and 500GB drives. Oh, and if you're worried about that optical drive you'll be removing, fret not -- these guys have a nifty external enclosure designed specifically to give it another home. How quaint.[Via Macworld]
Oh, thats cool.
Guy at work got the earlier model, just uses it in it's "special" enclosure as an external hard drive...
Facepalm...
now thats just a good idea
Although this is a good idea, I know on the older MBP's it's actually slower, because it uses a PATA interface instead of SATA. I still think that Apple should include the option for a 2nd HDD drive bay, allowing an optical drive also. If HP and Dell (probably other companies too) can do it in a 17" form factor, why not apple? I say this because I want to get a unibody MBP and use an SSD/HDD combo for good performance and storage options. I just don't want to have a slower HDD drive speed and have to toss my DVD drive.
i got an older MBP and it uses SATA
antoniorvv: The older MBPs use PATA for the optical drive but SATA for the primary hard drive. Go into System Profiler and click on ATA. You should see your optical drive there.
PATA is still no slower than SATA in real life situations, the current incarnation of PATA makes out at 133MB/sec, far faster than any 2.5" traditional HD, which max out around 100MB/sec. of course with SSD, PATA could be cause a bottleneck.
Many Lenovo Thinkpad models have an optional "Lenovo ThinkPad Serial ATA Hard Drive Bay Adapter". This allows the user to hotswap the optical drive for a SATA HDD and vice versa. The adapter is only ~$50. It is empty so you can insert any 2.5" SATA HDD you wish.
Or a 2nd battery, or other things. Extremely practical so your not forced to do stuff like this. Dont you void your warranty doing this anyways?
I just got that a few weeks ago, haven't used my optical drive since. 2nd HDD + Hotswappability + Ability to change for optical drive or battery = HEAVEN! I am going to be using ThinkPads FOREVER. My T61 is my first laptop and I am addicted to my fingerprint reader, TrackPoint and how unbelievably sturdy it is. I think it could take being run over, and I'm not surprised that a ThinkPad could make it through those tests mentioned earlier. Best of all, my dad works for IBM, so I get awesome discounts on top of the sales that Lenovo always has. I
Hey, dude, did your ThinkPad just crash?
Hey Leo, just wanted to go to the effort of telling you that your name sucks.
This has been out for a month or so actually...
The thing is, it's $130, but since the unibody MB and MBPs use the SATA interface for their optical drive, you can actually splice together a solution for under $10. I haven't done it just because I'm lazy and non-crafty, but I have a feeling this thing is grossly overpriced...
a little late to the party, but it is a nice idea. apple should be doing this themselves though. i wonder how much this will set someone back (and if the apple tax is included here as well)
anyone got one for an hp dv7? i'd love a 3rd hard drive in my lappy
SATA VS PATA should not matter for 2.5" drivers as even PATA/UDMA do up to 133MB/sec.
If I owned one, I'd put a 60-120GB fast SSD (like an OCZ Vertex or Intel X25) in the main slot to take advantage of SATA and then a ~500GB 2.5" drive in the CD slot..
If they're not gonna include Blu Ray, why not take out the useless optical drive? lol.
I'd hate to buy a $3000 laptop knowing full well it doesn't even have the latest technology (Blu Ray, among other things).
A) MBP starts at $2000
B) You and twenty-three other people care about having battery-sucking Blu-Ray on a laptop
C) You are obviously a troll. STFU
Maybe 23 thousand. Fool.
A) The 17 inch (the only one that can fit a slot loading Blu Ray drive (12.7 mm) starts at 2800, not to mention adding options pushes the price further.
B) Well us 24 people are going to take our business elsewhere then :) Please tell me why spending much money on a computer with outdated technology is a GOOD thing. (I don't care about how "battery sucking" it is, it's a given that all optical drives use a lot of power).
C) Thanks for calling me a troll. I see you have nothing else to say so I can assume your argument is quite weak.
by the way, my whole point was that this is a good idea. DVD's are useless to me, either upgrade to the next level, or replace it with some serious storage (500 GB HD).
The thing is, Blu-ray is useless to me so why would I want to pay extra for something I don't want? DVD does what is necessary and Blu-ray is just overkill for the sake of it.
So the MBP is doing what numerous laptops have been doing for years in a more half assed approach (MANY other laptops can easily remove the device.) and everyone gets excited about it. Now where have I heard that before...oh yah every other week.
What people are forgetting is that Apple pioneered hot-swappable bays with the old G3 Pismo laptop. You could have two batteries, zip drive, floppy drive, DVD-ROM, CD-ROM, and I think some third party companies made hard drive modules.
So all you naysayers out there, YES Apple did it first. It just didn't work all that well back then because it made the laptop friggin huge, and Apple steered towards size-reduction in the next model, the Aluminum G4. Which was the first sub one-inch full featured laptop, another Apple first.
The hinges also broke easily, and it ran hot enough to cause infertility. YMMV.
If Apple pioneered it on a laptop that came out in February 2000, then why did I have a Sony in 1999 that had those same features (extra bay that can hold a battery, DVD-ROM, CD recorder, floppy drive, ZIP drive, or "weight saver"). Not to mention it was made in the USA.
http://esupport.sony.com/perl/swu-list.pl?template=EN&mdl=PCGXG9
But who cares if Sony actually pioneered it, Apple had it back then, Lenovo has it now, or if PATA on an older MBP is slower than SATA. The point of the article is it is available now for the unibody MB/MBP, and if you have one of those, you can now do it too.
dt
So I could run a ZFS mirror configuration with this? That would be nice.
RAID ahoy. Sold. Rarely use optical.
pata + sata software raid = amazing. enjoy!
/S