Can I put the boot SSD into the optical drive holder?

[Bradamante]

Hi there,

so a friend of mine has a MacBook Pro 13" from 2012. He is using one of those solutions where you have an additional hard disc in the optical drive slot. Problem is that the S-ATA cable for the internal SSD is broken. Now we are considering moving the SSD from the original S-ATA connector to the optical drive holder.

Question: Is this connection fast enough to enable the SSD?

 

[Juicy Box]

Question: Is this connection fast enough to enable the SSD?

I don't know why it wouldn't work.

People replace their optical drives with SSDs on their laptops all the time.

I was thinking about putting a SSD in place of my optical drive on my 2011 MBP, and using a software RAID0 with the two internal drives as the boot drive.

I don't see why it wouldn't work with just the one SSD on your 2013 MBP.

 

[Bradamante]

Well I am sure it works, but the question is at what speed? Maybe the optical drive holder is a S-ATA 1 or 2 connection? Or there is some other reason?

 

[Juicy Box]

It might be SATA II, so maybe not at the full potential, but SATA II isn't that bad.

Keep this in mind, I bet a new SSD connected using SATA II would have faster read/write speeds than the base model 2019 iMac.

 

[Mr_Brightside_@]

Hi there,

so a friend of mine has a MacBook Pro 13" from 2012. He is using one of those solutions where you have an additional hard disc in the optical drive slot. Problem is that the S-ATA cable for the internal SSD is broken. Now we are considering moving the SSD from the original S-ATA connector to the optical drive holder.

Question: Is this connection fast enough to enable the SSD?

Any reason he's not just replacing the SATA cable?

 

[treekram]

On my 13" 2012 non-Retina MBP, both bays have comparable SATA3 speeds (I have Evo 850's 250GB in each bay). If you look at the following link:
https://eshop.macsales.com/item/OWC/DDAMBS0GB/

In the section that says "Special compatibility notes", it says that "Testing has demonstrated that Apple factory hardware does not reliably support a 6G (6Gb/s) Solid State Drive or Hard Disk Drive in the optical bay of 2011 and 2012 Macbook Pros." However, nobody has reported this problem in these forums in the 2012 MBP (it definitely is an issue with the 2011 MBP). And, OWC added the 2012 qualifier later - for a long time it was only the 2011 that was mentioned (you can check websites that archive earlier versions of this page if you want to verify that). I don't know why OWC added the 2012 qualifier.

As I was typing this, the previous poster mentions replacing the SATA cable and I was going to mention the same thing. Replacement cables are readily available. If it's the connector on the logic board that got damaged, then you would have to use the optical bay. Finally, be aware that the caddy that holds the drive in the optical slot does have electronics so if do happen to have problems, you can try a different caddy to see if it solves the issue. The drive in the optical slot can be selected as the boot disk in the System Preferences.