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MCE Optibay Alternative CHEAP

miata said:
I am considering getting a MBP 13 and replacing the Superdrive with an OWC SSD drive. This would allow me to have two drives, but I'm wondering about the battery impact.

Assuming I keep the HDD in the original place is there a way to spin down the HDD to save battery power?
Click to expand...

Drives in the original HDD slot won't be able to sleep, even if you boot off another drive.

I just put an Optibay in my 15", put the original hard drive into the Optibay, and then put an OCZ Vertex 2 into the original hard drive slot. Battery life seems as if it wasn't as good as before, but I think it's only trimmed 30-60 min, which isn't that bad since these new Pro's have a 8ish hour battery to begin with.
 
I'm thinking of using these to add a 2nd drive to my Macbook pro:

Caddy: http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=220644043981&ssPageName=STRK:MEWAX:IT

Superdrive enclosure: http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=220657484115&ssPageName=STRK:MEWAX:IT

Would these work? Just worried the superdrive might look a bit unseamly in that enclosure since its slot-loading.

I found an Australian seller for the MCE kit: http://www.macfixit.com.au/shop/index.php?_a=viewProd&productId=942

But damn its pricey...

bugout said:
I got this external case for the superdrive:
http://www.ayagroup.com/product.php?productid=17499&cat=0&page=1

and this bezel for the front of it:
http://mac.macrecycling.com/slot-loading-optical-drive-bezel-panasonicmatshita-p-100903.html
Click to expand...

Does anyone sell an enclosure like that on ebay or in Australia? I'd much rather have a slot-loading bezel than leaving the front exposed...
 
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nsx23 said:
I'm thinking of using these to add a 2nd drive to my Macbook pro:

Caddy: http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=220644043981&ssPageName=STRK:MEWAX:IT

Superdrive enclosure: http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=220657484115&ssPageName=STRK:MEWAX:IT

Would these work? Just worried the superdrive might look a bit unseamly in that enclosure since its slot-loading.

I found an Australian seller for the MCE kit: http://www.macfixit.com.au/shop/index.php?_a=viewProd&productId=942

But damn its pricey...



Does anyone sell an enclosure like that on ebay or in Australia? I'd much rather have a slot-loading bezel than leaving the front exposed...
Click to expand...

You will find that you wont really use the superdrive as much so its not really an issue. But as for finding a cheap one on ebay, well they are available but the are not cheap. Its actually cheaper to just buy an external DVD drive, and they are usually faster than the stock DVD drive and you get bonuses of Lightscribe, Dual Layer burning and even Blueray (use toast to burn the discs) if thats what your after.

As for the HD caddy. They are much the same, the big difference is that some allow you to screw the drive in place and others use a retention pin/spring system.

Once the drive is in place in the old DVD bay it wont really move anyhow but if your not 100% convinced just use a little bit of double sided padded tape to secure it. you will only need a small square.

If you are squeezing one of the 12.5mm drives in there then it wont matter because they will fit pretty snug to start off with.
 
I'm just trying to keep costs down as much as possible. I'm putting in the old WD 500GB Scoprio blue back in there to act as a storage + bootable backup drive. I currently have 128GB carved out to fully back up my SSD using Time machine already.

Any good DVD drives recommended? And I understand you need to patch the Apple DVD player to use an external drive.

I currently still have Applecare, so if I need to return it I can just swap the superdrive back in right? I still have the original 160GB HDD with a fresh install of SL for that purpose since I'm not sure what Apple would do with my SSD lol.
 
If you can avoid id dont put the WD drive in there. They are slow and cause more beachballs due to the fact that the 5400rpm drive is just not cutting it.

If you can stretch the budget look at getting a Seagate Momentus 7200 drive. The 7200 drive uses minimal extra power and it will make a hell of a difference to the boot up and every day use of the machine.

Also you can replace both hard drives and ram under applecare. all you will need to do is keep the old cd drive to be able to swap it out. they will be none the wiser.

chuck your 160 in a USB caddy and get yourself some extra storage space by doing so.
 
Hmm, the Blue would just be a storage drive that I spin down most of the time. I suppose I could get a 7.2K drive but can't really afford it at the moment since I just bought 8GB of Ram.
 
Sorry to bump a thread, but would this work for my macbook pro?

http://cgi.ebay.com.au/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=180524269893

DSC_0.jpg


Just wondering if that piece of black plastic on the bottom right of the picture might need to be removed to fit.
 
rckstwrz said:
Drives in the original HDD slot won't be able to sleep, even if you boot off another drive.

I just put an Optibay in my 15", put the original hard drive into the Optibay, and then put an OCZ Vertex 2 into the original hard drive slot. Battery life seems as if it wasn't as good as before, but I think it's only trimmed 30-60 min, which isn't that bad since these new Pro's have a 8ish hour battery to begin with.
Click to expand...

Did your mac boot up correctly with the original hard drive in the optibay?
 
So would I be able to put the HDD into the optibay and have it spindown when not in use without issues?
 
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nsx23 said:
Sorry to bump a thread, but would this work for my macbook pro?

http://cgi.ebay.com.au/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=180524269893

DSC_0.jpg


Just wondering if that piece of black plastic on the bottom right of the picture might need to be removed to fit.
Click to expand...

everytime i look at this FENVI ass! a cheap optibay knock-off from ebay, i wanna punch my self.

i moved my itunes library into secondary HD with this Fenvi optibay. 1 day of usage, the drive is not recognized anymore and made my MBP beachballing like crazy when i open itunes! maybe i got the faulty bay. but the first time i received this bay, i thought it was really poorly built and it was a biggest mistake to move my whole itunes library to that thing.

im waiting to get back home now so i can remove it and try to load the HD on the external case i have at home. i hope my itunes library is ok. :(
 
SSD for Virtual Machines?

Hi
I am looking at replacing the optibay to allow me to purchase a SSD and move the HDD into the optibay. I am principally looking at doing this to increase the performance overall of my MBP and allow my VMs under VMware to work better. Has anyone got experience of this and do SSDs make any significant improvements for VMWare/Virtualbox?

I am in the UK so if anyone has any recomendations for the Optibay I would appreciate it. Here is one I found http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/2nd-HDD-caddy...K_Computing_HardDrives_RL&hash=item3a5db107bf

Is this any good?

Any suggestions for a quick 128/160GB SSD? Intel X25-M? Ebuyer have them for just under £300.

Thanks
 
rckstwrz said:
Drives in the original HDD slot won't be able to sleep, even if you boot off another drive.

I just put an Optibay in my 15", put the original hard drive into the Optibay, and then put an OCZ Vertex 2 into the original hard drive slot. Battery life seems as if it wasn't as good as before, but I think it's only trimmed 30-60 min, which isn't that bad since these new Pro's have a 8ish hour battery to begin with.
Click to expand...
This is weird. If you only have a single drive in the HDD bay you can get it to sleep -- right? That is the purpose of the "Put the hard disk(s) to sleep when possible" setting in the Energy Saver System Preferences. I would think that the SuperDrive bay would be more problematic since it wasn't designed for an HDD.
 
Not 100% related but of all those people running an SSD in the opti bay - did you have any problems with the 10.6.5 update?

My machine won't wake from sleep with 10.6.5 installed. It's a MacBook Pro 17" early 2007. Now the only differences from stock are:
- Installed opti bay + Intel X-25M
- 8GB RAM

I am trying to narrow down possible causes. Other things I've thought of: I've set the hibernate mode to "sleep only" since hibernation doesn't work properly anyway when starting from the SSD in the opti bay. I changed that setting though and it still crashed. I went back to 10.6.4 for the time being - 10.6.5 was completely unusable.
 
My only gripe is that I don't really want a second drive in my machine, I just want an external access to SATA drives. I imagine I could use the slit of the optical drive to set up something that would accomplish this.

I need a ton of storage and I want to preserve my battery life. I'll be forced to use a desk to access my larger files, but that won't be so bad.
 
orthorim said:
Not 100% related but of all those people running an SSD in the opti bay - did you have any problems with the 10.6.5 update?

My machine won't wake from sleep with 10.6.5 installed. It's a MacBook Pro 17" early 2007. Now the only differences from stock are:
- Installed opti bay + Intel X-25M
- 8GB RAM

I am trying to narrow down possible causes. Other things I've thought of: I've set the hibernate mode to "sleep only" since hibernation doesn't work properly anyway when starting from the SSD in the opti bay. I changed that setting though and it still crashed. I went back to 10.6.4 for the time being - 10.6.5 was completely unusable.
Click to expand...
That is a big bummer. I never shutdown my system, and if I can't wake from sleep..
 
miata said:
This is weird. If you only have a single drive in the HDD bay you can get it to sleep -- right? That is the purpose of the "Put the hard disk(s) to sleep when possible" setting in the Energy Saver System Preferences. I would think that the SuperDrive bay would be more problematic since it wasn't designed for an HDD.
Click to expand...

One cause may be that the HD in the optibay doesn't sleep. You could check that with apples hdd sleep tool, I've mentioned it somewhere in this thread.

My setup is the reverse - ssd in optibay and I still get worse battery life. That's because various programs wake the HD. Spotlight search for example. After that it takes 5 minutes or so for the drive to go back to sleep state.

The only way around this is to unmount the HD in Disk Utility when not needed. When I do this my battery life is better than with the HD alone. I chose the HD I use precisely because it uses very little power in sleep mode. Toshiba and fujitsu are the best in this regard.
 
orthorim said:
One cause may be that the HD in the optibay doesn't sleep. You could check that with apples hdd sleep tool, I've mentioned it somewhere in this thread.

My setup is the reverse - ssd in optibay and I still get worse battery life. That's because various programs wake the HD. Spotlight search for example. After that it takes 5 minutes or so for the drive to go back to sleep state.

The only way around this is to unmount the HD in Disk Utility when not needed. When I do this my battery life is better than with the HD alone. I chose the HD I use precisely because it uses very little power in sleep mode. Toshiba and fujitsu are the best in this regard.
Click to expand...
I was getting all excited about striping a pair of SSD drives for crazy performance. However, since this would be my boot disk, I would be hosed. I put my system to sleep 7-8 times a day as I run between meetings, so this kills the idea of having a RAID 0 SSD set-up.

Bummer:(

I've been reading about lots of other MBPs with superfast internal SSD RAID 0 configurations. Are you saying that none of those folks can put their system to sleep?

UPDATE: After reading a second time I think you are talking about sleeping the drive rather than sleeping the computer. Hopefully, that means that I can put a RAID 0 SSD system to sleep.

This link has all the details -=- thanks danbt79
 
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miata said:
I was getting all excited about striping a pair of SSD drives for crazy performance. However, since this would be my boot disk, I would be hosed. I put my system to sleep 7-8 times a day as I run between meetings, so this kills the idea of having a RAID 0 SSD set-up.

Bummer:(

I've been reading about lots of other MBPs with superfast internal SSD RAID 0 configurations. Are you saying that none of those folks can put their system to sleep?

UPDATE: After reading a second time I think you are talking about sleeping the drive rather than sleeping the computer. Hopefully, that means that I can put a RAID 0 SSD system to sleep.

This link has all the details -=- thanks danbt79
Click to expand...

Yes - the latter! Sorry I was talking about hard drive sleep. Hard drive sleep only affects battery life, nothing else.

So the SSD RAID should work. The system won't hibernate but that's also the case when the SSD is in the opti bay and without RAID.

I just think one SSD is plenty fast, particularly if you get the OWC Mercury extreme. The access times - which is where SSDs excel - are the same for RAID / no RAID. So - before you get 2 cheaper SSDs, one OWC Mercury Extreme is probably better, particularly in the long run when other SSDs slow down. But if you get 2 really fast SSDs... yeah if the RAID works, it should be great.
 
orthorim said:
Yes - the latter! Sorry I was talking about hard drive sleep. Hard drive sleep only affects battery life, nothing else.

So the SSD RAID should work. The system won't hibernate but that's also the case when the SSD is in the opti bay and without RAID.

I just think one SSD is plenty fast, particularly if you get the OWC Mercury extreme. The access times - which is where SSDs excel - are the same for RAID / no RAID. So - before you get 2 cheaper SSDs, one OWC Mercury Extreme is probably better, particularly in the long run when other SSDs slow down. But if you get 2 really fast SSDs... yeah if the RAID works, it should be great.
Click to expand...
It turns out that two 120 GB OWC Mercury EXTREMEs are cheaper than a single 240 GB OWC Mercury EXTREME. Even if I add in the additional cost of the OWC Data Doubler they would be almost the same price.

It seems that I would then get double the throughput for no extra cost. And reliability...

I also have this crazy idea of partitioning the two SSDs in such a way that I can create a big, fast RAID 0 disk and a smaller, very reliable RAID 1 disk. I wouldn't be able to to do that with a single SSD.
 
Not sure if any one has posted this but Maxupgrades.com do an excellent cheap alternative, here's a pik of mine that I did my self 2 weeks ago .. it took me about 30mins to do as I was being extra careful, You get all the tools you need but no instructions..I followed the iFixit guide and it worked perfectly...
 

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