Is it SAFE to run a Samsung 830 in a Late 2011 MBP's optical bay?

[Leek]

I have a 17" Late 2011 MBP and I wanted to put a second hard drive in it. The trouble is, the caddy I have (this one here, got good reviews) and the 750GB drive that came with the MacBook don't fit in the optical bay without severely pushing against the keyboard and the bottom panel. The Samsung 830 I was going to use as my main drive fits in the optical bay perfectly fine though, being slimmer than the standard HDD.

I know I would lose some performance running the SSD in the optical bay but is it safe? Is it stable? Could I still configure it as the main drive even though it wouldn't be in the main slot? Thank you all.

 

[T5BRICK]

Yes, it's safe to run the SSD in your optical drive slot. It should work just fine as a boot drive, and I thought the optical drive SATA port supported SATA III on newer Macs.

 

[SDAVE]

It might run at SATA 3.0, just to note.

Honestly, these drives are so fast that it wouldn't make sense using it with SATA 3.0

 

[bhattsan]

Yes, don't put the hard drive in the optibay slot (its not as insulated against vibrations, which might cause the drive to get ruined when moving about).

 

[Idefix]

they make kits for securing the SSD in the optical bay.

= no vibration

 

[chmodme]

you cannot assume it will work reliably

There are countless threads about this issue. The Optical Bay is driven by the same Intel chips as the main Bay - and thus potentially capable of SATA 3 handshake - but there is no guarantee it will be reliable. It may work fine, and it also may connect at SATA 2 speeds and also be fine. Or it might work poorly.

There are apparently very subtle differences in the mother boards and logic as Apple built these - leading to the now standard SATA 3 specs. Literally differences between early, middle and late 2011 machines.

I know, i have an early 2011 MBP. I run SATA 3 in the main Bay, and I moved the OEM Toshiba/Apple drive to the Optical Bay and it runs at SATA 2 speeds. When I tried the SATA 3 drive in the Optical Bay, my machine went berserk.

YMMV.

 

[Orlandoech]

No it's not. Kanye West might pop out and yell at you for making a horrible decision and say that the main bay should have won the ssd.