Macbook primary (boot drive) SSD in Optical bay

[1300bubba]

I wanted to know if anyone has put a SSD in their macbook optical bay and used the SSD to run their operating system?
The reason is I could use the original drive bay location for with the original drive (wiped clean for file storage) or future large one with easy access without having to rip the laptop apart in the future. Also can you change the booting of the macbook without too much trouble from the original drive to where the optical drive would have been?
My optical drive is damaged and rather than replace it with another I wanted to explore my options and the Solid State Drive looked interesting.

The second question is how small of a SSD will the Macbook need to run? There is no sense paying for a big SSD just for running the OSX (or is there)?

Any comments are welcomed.

 

[spinnerlys]

To boot from the SSD, you have to put the SSD into the slot where the HDD is, and put the HDD where the optical drive was.

The size of the boot drive (SSD) is depending on the kind and amount of applications you want to start from that SSD.

32GB to 64GB should be fine for most uses.

 

[Darth.Titan]

To boot from the SSD, you have to put the SSD into the slot where the HDD is, and put the HDD where the optical drive was.

The size of the boot drive (SSD) is depending on the kind and amount of applications you want to start from that SSD.

32GB to 64GB should be fine for most uses.

That's not true. Many folks in this thread are booting from hard drives installed in their optical bays.

Think about it. You can boot from your optical drive, why would you not be able to boot from a hard drive plugged into the same port?

 

[spinnerlys]

That's not true. Many folks in this thread are booting from hard drives installed in their optical bays.

Think about it. You can boot from your optical drive, why would you not be able to boot from a hard drive plugged into the same port?

Okay. I might have not read all threads about that, but when I read the ones I did read, it was always mentioned, that it was not possible to put the boot drive into the optical bay, even though it doesn't make sense, as one can clearly boot from the optical drive with bootable media.
So thanks for the link.

 

[ux4all]

Works, no problem

I had 2 X25-M 80. All my data was on the parent drive and my second drive went into the Optical slot. Prior to putting them into a RAID 0 configuration, I booted off the second drive so I could move my files off of the first. Just tell OS X where to boot from (this part I am not sure how to automate since I only booted from the second drive twice and just held the Option button and selected it).

Hope this helps.