Benefits or removing DVD drive from 13 MBP?

[Gregintosh]

Hey,

I know there is another thread debating the merits of Apple ridding the notebooks of DVD drives, but I wanted to ask something a bit more practical here so please do not turn this into a debate of whether or not all drives should be removed.

My question is, has anyone done this for themselves?

And if so,

- Did it impact battery life?
- Did it make the unit much lighter?
- Did it make the unit run much cooler?
- Did it make the unit run more quietly?
- Does it "feel" weird or unbalanced now that the drive is gone?

I was strongly debating getting either a new MBP 13" or a MBA, with the only real pro of the MBA being its weight (now that the MBP has the SD slot, which I would definitely use, the 7 hour battery, the better screen, and overall better specs for the money).

But if removing the drive removes some of the weight, maybe it will be more comparable to the Air?

I think a slightly lighter, cooler running MBP 13" would be even more perfect than the stock unit.

Also, has anyone used one of those replacement kits that gets rid of the DVD and puts in another internal HD?

I guess if removing the drive doesn't make it cooler and much lighter, than RAID'ing 2 SSDs together would make it much faster.

 

[Guy Mancuso]

I have a 2.93 15inch and I removed the Optical drive and installed a bracket from Maxupgrades to install a second drive. So end of day I have 2 Intel 80gb SSD drives running Raid 0. Now not sure on additional battery life but SSD will take less power than a spinning drive be much cooler to run and many other benefits to switching over to SSD drives. Yes i am flying like a rocket here. If I had my way or more money I would have went Intel E drives but the cost is still to high. Now i would imagine and sure you can do it on the 13inch as well, the only question is the bracket and if it is the same setup as the 15 inch with regards to screwing it down to the MPB. They maybe using a different location than the 15in. that I do not know . I would bet a dozen donuts though Maxupgrades will have a bracket out soon for the 13 inch to do this or maybe be able to even answer the question will the 15 work inside the 13. Obviously the optical drive is the same brand and size as the 15inch. These kinds of parts Apple will use across the whole to buy in bulk.

Now you can buy a external enclosure for the optical drive and run it USB 2. Or like myself you can just buy a really fast external DVD drive . I did this because I burn DVD's for my clients images that I shot for them. I'm a working pro photographer so having a faster better DVD was worth it to me and there not very expensive around 100 to 200 dollars depending on what you want but mine runs on USB 2, they also sell Firewire units out there as well.

Bottom line for me since I sold my MacPro to have a very fast portable machine it was worth it but don't let anyone fool ya this cost a lot of money to do. Seriously from my POV I would NOT run two 7200 spinning drives though, will get to hot and eat batteries for breakfast but that is my opinion and I think the SSD route running two drives is the best way to go. been running like this for a couple months and it works a charm. Hope that helped or more likely just put a nice hole in your wallet. Sorry . LOL

On the weight I think it is a marginal expectation to lower the weight and not worth thinking about, the optical drive is very light to begin with.

 

[Guy Mancuso]

After looking at the tear down of the 13in it uses the identical screw placement as the 15 inch

 

[Gregintosh]

I'd probably get 2 low cost SSDs from NewEgg. Saw some with pretty decent specs for around $350 or so per 128GB, though I'd likely wait a bit for prices to come down a bit more to make the upgrade (maybe around Christmas or catch some cyber monday deals or something).

Did you at any point run your laptop without having anything in the DVD drive's place?

Also, does the laptop run cooler now with 2 SSDs? I imagine it takes up less space than the DVD did to begin with which should provide some extra room for air to move around...

 

[Guy Mancuso]

No I removed the optical and immediately installed the SSD and Bracket. I really have no heat issues . The laptop is very cool to the touch where the drives are. The only heat to touch i get is at all the connections on the left side upper but I have every connection filled up with a lot of external stuff going on. So more electrical connection heat than anything else and it is just warm not hot in that area. Like I said i am running a 30 inch, DVD drives , E-sata from the express port, Drobo and a powered USB hub plus audio. So there is a lot going on at the connection area but SSD drives run very cool. My fans will fire up when processing large Raw files but they spin down fairly quickly after a lot of stress from processing. I use a 31mpx camera so my are huge and takes a lot of horsepower. I maybe one of those considered a very heavy abuser of a system. When you process 200 or 300 images at 181mgs each for a final file than you really are talking about pushing heavy data around. My cores run full bore when processing and my ram peaks out about 6gbs being used at that time. My raw processing program capture One is very core and processor dependent so it goes for the juggler of the system.