Info about installing a second HD in optibay

Xylian said:

Hi,
I've seen this low price optibay adapter for MBP on Amazon http://www.amazon.co.uk/LEICKE-Drive-Adapter-Converter-MacBook/dp/B004MA1MII and I was thinking about putting a small SSD as primary drive and leave my 320 GB hdd as secondary drive... I have some questions for you:

1. Is it better to have the primary drive (SSD) on the standard HDD connector or within the optibay?
2. My 320 GB hdd has only 70 GB of free space, so I can't simply move its content on the SDD.. I have big iTunes (70 GB) and iPhoto (30GB) libraries, is it possible to move them on a secondary drive, or does iTune/iPhoto look for the library always within the user folder, which is within the primary drive?
3. Have you ever used or heard about this drive adapter?

Click to expand...

1) Leave the HDD in its stock (primary) bay. Theres some kind of anti-shock mechanism that protects the drive. (ive had a couple macrumors members tell me this, and when i was putting in my drives into my optibay caddy and primary slot, the primary is definitely more HDD friendly)
2) Cant help you there
3) No, but it looks no different from the Fenvi adaptors sold on ebay. They're all the same. All youre really paying for is a SATA extension and some plastic to hold the drive. Thats it. Theres nothing special about any of the of optibay caddys. Just find yourself the cheapest one you can find on ebay. I got mine from a seller called Segoo and mine works perfectly eventhough it didn't have mounts for two of the three screws. Just search for a seller named Nimitz and buy his, it goes for about 25 bucks and does exactly what its supposed to. Even 25 bucks is too expensive though, lol.

Nothing keeps you from moving data somewhere temporarily.
You can redirect the Pictures and Music folders.
In itunes you can also specifiy where it should look for music. Independent from where the "music" folder actually is.
iPhoto checks Pictures by default.
Install iPhotoLibraryManager with which you can have multiple libraries and put them also at different locations. Not that you need to but it comes in handy sometimes.

As for #1. In the HD bay the drive is also mounted properly with some vibration absorption. I never tried moving it from there but in theory it should make less noise there. It works perfectly well having the SSD aka main drive in the optibay.
There are only some early 2011 MBPs where the SATA of the optibay was only SATA 2 which limits the really fast new SSDs. But all notebooks shipped after April or something I think sport SATA 3 on both ports.