Blu-Ray drive in mid 2012 MacBook Pro

[DouglasCarroll]

Hi everyone,

I'm seriously considering installing an internal Blu-Ray drive in my Mid 2012 13" MacBook Pro. I currently rip Blu-Ray's using a Blu-Ray drive in my Mac Pro but am also interested in a mobile option. I know that I can easily get an external, but I enjoy the thought (and challenge) of installing an internal and I really love my 2012 so I though, what the hell. I already know how to do this, but was wondering if anyone else here had done this to a unibody MacBook Pro and had any advice or thoughts?

Also, this isn't so I can "play movies off the Blu-Ray", but more so I can "copy them" to the hard drive and then I use Hand Brake to convert them to an HD .mp4.

Thanks!

 

[B S Magnet]

Hi everyone,

I'm seriously considering installing an internal Blu-Ray drive in my Mid 2012 13" MacBook Pro. I currently rip Blu-Ray's using a Blu-Ray drive in my Mac Pro but am also interested in a mobile option. I know that I can easily get an external, but I enjoy the thought (and challenge) of installing an internal and I really love my 2012 so I though, what the hell. I already know how to do this, but was wondering if anyone else here had done this to a unibody MacBook Pro and had any advice or thoughts?

Also, this isn't so I can "play movies off the Blu-Ray", but more so I can "copy them" to the hard drive and then I use Hand Brake to convert them to an HD .mp4.

Thanks!

It ought to be a fairly straightforward swap, particularly if you stick with a Matsushita/Matshita (Panasonic) SATA Blu-Ray model (and not a Sony model), as I believe Apple stuck with Matsushita as a vendor for portable form-factor optical drives across all aluminium and unibody MBPs (and, possibly, on all MacBooks and Intel Mac minis).

The UJ-265s and UJ-267s, for instance, appear to be a good candidates, but you’ll want to verify the height dimensions of the SuperDrive in your MBP to determine which to use. (The UJ-265 is 12.7mm tall and the UJ-267 is 9.5mm; the UJ-167 appears similar to the UJ-267 and is also 9.5mm, but may have different features and/or capabilities.) Slot-load drives for portables more or less standardized in dimensions after about 2007, but it’s always a good thing to double-check your existing MBP SuperDrive model’s height/thickness beforehand. Some laptops need 9.5mm height, and others need 12.7mm.

While I’ve not swapped a SuperDrive for a Blu-Ray, I have upgraded and swapped a DVD-ROM drive in an iBook G3 with a DVD-RW unit (sort of unreal that it works exactly as it should, given how many more revisions there’d be before Apple began including SuperDrives in iBooks). The dimensions between those two drives were identical.

For that era Mac (the IDE/ATAPI days), I also used the old Patchburn utility. As I recall, my system was able to see and access the new DVD-RW drive without this patcher, but it may have improved some of the capabilities of the newer drive. In that case, I did stay with Matsushita for the DVD-RW drive, as the OEM DVD-ROM drive was also made by Matsushita.

Let us know what you end up doing and how it works out!