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MCE Optibay Alternative CHEAP

tjb1 said:
So is every other enclosure...minus Apples. Also dont tighten the Maxupgrades optibay too much or you will bend the speaker grill on top.
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I don't think it matters very much but my Newmodeus SATA-SATA is made from metal. It's not like the thing is under a lot of stress in there though. Plastic should be just fine. Might be lighter, even.

An update on OS X 10.6.5 / 10.6.6 troubles I had - my problems were due to an 8GB RAM update I had gotten from OWC, not due to the SSD. Beware of OWC RAM.
 
orthorim said:
I don't think it matters very much but my Newmodeus SATA-SATA is made from metal. It's not like the thing is under a lot of stress in there though. Plastic should be just fine. Might be lighter, even.

An update on OS X 10.6.5 / 10.6.6 troubles I had - my problems were due to an 8GB RAM update I had gotten from OWC, not due to the SSD. Beware of OWC RAM.
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Were talking about the superdrive enclosure, not the hdd mount. The maxupgrades hdd mount is made out of a piece of 1/4" billet aluminum that is anodized.
 
I'll apologise, as this thread is very long.

I have a mid 07 2.4 15" and want to use an ssd in the primary sata slot, and a seagate 750gb 7200 in the optical drive slot (and get an enclosure for the superdrive)

I've poked around this thread but can't seem to find a decisive answer on which bay to get or which external case.. were there any firm conclusions for the non unibody.

Would this work in the non unibody, assuming i removed the bezel? http://cgi.ebay.com/SATA-Hard-Drive...C_Drives_Storage_Internal&hash=item27b4f60c36

Cheers!
 
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A couple of problems

I'm really happy with the SSD because everything feels much snappier. There are a few nagging problems, none of which have been directly addressed so far (I think).

The first is a pop-up message that shows up every once in a while: Popup
It says: The disk was not ejected properly. If possible, always eject a disk before unplugging it or turning it off.
The message refers to the HD that I have in the optibay. After it shows up the HD doesn't appear in Disk Utility until I reboot (which luckily only takes 15 seconds). The message appears totally randomly- sometimes 20 minutes after rebooting, sometimes a few hours. And it's not due to the HD being loose. It's in there really tight and everything is fine with a reboot.

The other problem is that 1 out of about every 5 times that I try to put my computer to sleep it snags and doesn't go to sleep for about 5 minutes. Then when it wakes up the CPU is running like crazy because of kernel-task and I need to restart to get everything back to normal.

My set up uses this really cheap Fenvi optibay adapter: Adapter
I've got an Intel X25 in the main HD slot. My sleep setting is 3 though I've tried 0 (and 1 which sucks). I've got "Put the hard disks to sleep when possible" checked though the same things where happening when it wasn't.

Does anybody have any ideas for what might be wrong? I'm also leaning towards putting a fresh install of OSX onto the SSD but my first install, less than a month ago, was fresh (no data migration tool) so I'm wondering how effective that will be. Then there's replacing the Fenvi adapter. That would be really annoying to replace after closing up my laptop for (what I hoped would be) the last time but would be worth it to get rid of these problems. Has anyone experienced these issues and found a fix?

Thanks

UPDATE: My mistake was trying to mess with the automount feature and not working it through all the way. So I just typed "sudo pico /etc/fstab/" into terminal and deleted what I had there. It wasn't working anyways. Since then the sleep problem and the Eject popup are gone.
 
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@jonstieg - sounds like your optibay adapter doesn't work correctly. I'd just get another brand. You say it was cheap - thats most likely it then. If the HD randomly unmounts something is very wrong on the hardware side. Chances is thats causing the other problem too.

You can try zapping the pram (hold cmd+p+r at startup) but if that doesnt help i would say its your optibay enclosure.
 
I'm considering doing the optibay on two of my machines. I probably won't go SSD because we are going to start using PGP disk encryption and it seems there are some issues with performance using PGP and SSD. So, I want to go with 2 HDD. I read this in this old thread
https://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?p=9928427#post9928427

bware189 said:
Honestly, even though I originally agreed with everyone saying that, so long as you don't jar it, you'll be fine, your data is at risk here. My hitachi is now suffering some major glitches, without even being close to full, and I owe this largely to it being in the optibay, and not having any SMS. Most importantly, when power going to the optibay is cut, it is cut without regard to the electronics needing a spin down, and thus you get the same affect as a hard shutdown whenever you cut power (sleep, software shutdown, etc).
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Has anyone who has done this noticed their drives becoming damaged from the cut of power mentioned here?

ETA: I will probably be using the MCE optibay. Was thinking about putting a Scorpio Blue in it.
 
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I'm wondering has anyone had issues with the sata smk13 optibay from ebay with the screw holes to install it in a unibody?

I can't install os x 10.6 when the ssd is in the optibay it fails with numerous errors but if I switch the ssd to the regular hdd spot everything installs perfectly. So I think there's something wrong with my optibay, does anyone have any troubleshooting ideas? Or got one that was broken like this?
 
optissues said:
I'm wondering has anyone had issues with the sata smk13 optibay from ebay with the screw holes to install it in a unibody?

I can't install os x 10.6 when the ssd is in the optibay it fails with numerous errors but if I switch the ssd to the regular hdd spot everything installs perfectly. So I think there's something wrong with my optibay, does anyone have any troubleshooting ideas? Or got one that was broken like this?
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SMK312 you mean? I personally didn't have any problems with the optibay I got from them. Used it on a MBP7,1. The SSD I installed in it was an 80GB Intel X25M-G2.

Does your HD work fine when you put it in the Optibay?
 
Yes I apologize it was smk312.

I'm using a macbook 5,1 and an ocz vertex2 60gb. Ideally I want to keep the stock hdd in the hdd spot so its protected by the sms. I haven't tried the hdd in the optibay just because I still have all my data on it. I wanted to have the ssd running and copy the important stuff to it before I do anything to the hdd. I did try the ssd in my pc and was able to install windows vista to it without any issues, that plus it working perfectly in the hdd spot makes me think the ssd is fine. I've never had any issues with my superdrive either so I'm left thinking something is wrong with the pcb in the optibay. I have reached out to smk312 but still no response that's why I was wondering if anyone else had any issues.
 
esata port

Did one of you guys check if MacOS supports hotplug/hotswap? I'm considering to build an esata port instead of a second internal harddrive.

Edit: Doesn't make sense for me, my MacBook3,1 seems to have PATA. Anyway: Did anyone experiment with eSATA? Back in WinXP it was possible to hotswap IDE devices, this ought to be possible with SATA and MacOSX.
 
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has anyone here had issues with freezing? I installed it without any issues but randomly my computer will freeze and I have to restart. I tried searching the thread and didn't see anything. I have a non unibody mbp.
 
hey guys , i need some help , i installed my ssd and hhd , ssd is in the optibay , hdd where supposed to be .

ok so , now my battery life in my macbook pro 13'' 2010 decreased alot , down to around 5 hours , i only use my computer to surf the web , itunes , and ocasionally adobe audition or games . i have an intel ssd 40gb and the momentus xt 7200 . i relocated the home folder to the hhd , and it looks like the hhd is always spinning because of that . also , i have windows in bootcamp . im able to reject that partition , but i cant reject the other partition .

it will be good if i put back the hitachi 5400 instead of the momentus ? also , how do you guys relocated your files ? , did you change the home folder to the hhd , or just have the files there and tell itunes or iphoto where are those files ?

btw sorry for my poor english .
 
menonitarocker said:
hey guys , i need some help , i installed my ssd and hhd , ssd is in the optibay , hdd where supposed to be .

ok so , now my battery life in my macbook pro 13'' 2010 decreased alot , down to around 5 hours , i only use my computer to surf the web , itunes , and ocasionally adobe audition or games . i have an intel ssd 40gb and the momentus xt 7200 . i relocated the home folder to the hhd , and it looks like the hhd is always spinning because of that . also , i have windows in bootcamp . im able to reject that partition , but i cant reject the other partition .

it will be good if i put back the hitachi 5400 instead of the momentus ? also , how do you guys relocated your files ? , did you change the home folder to the hhd , or just have the files there and tell itunes or iphoto where are those files ?

btw sorry for my poor english .
Click to expand...

I currently only have my music on my optibay and only itunes accesses it so I get around 6 with about half backlight, wifi, and bluetooth. I may try moving more over but im behind in school :)
 
has anyone gone through Maxupgrades.com and gotten the external enclosure? looks pretty awesome. Pretty pricey but looks like a macbook air superdrive case.
 
menonitarocker said:
hey guys , i need some help , i installed my ssd and hhd , ssd is in the optibay , hdd where supposed to be .

ok so , now my battery life in my macbook pro 13'' 2010 decreased alot , down to around 5 hours , i only use my computer to surf the web , itunes , and ocasionally adobe audition or games . i have an intel ssd 40gb and the momentus xt 7200 . i relocated the home folder to the hhd , and it looks like the hhd is always spinning because of that . also , i have windows in bootcamp . im able to reject that partition , but i cant reject the other partition .

it will be good if i put back the hitachi 5400 instead of the momentus ? also , how do you guys relocated your files ? , did you change the home folder to the hhd , or just have the files there and tell itunes or iphoto where are those files ?

btw sorry for my poor english .
Click to expand...

Arghh. This is why I'm so afraid to try an optibay solution, battery is extremely important to me. I'm considering just springing for a 120gb SSD or waiting until the 240gb SSD's come down a bit (I won't spend more than 250 max) and then when I need more storage (which isn't often) just getting a slim 500gb external HDD to hold movies/anime/music/pictures etc that I don't need on the go.
 
Kauai said:
Arghh. This is why I'm so afraid to try an optibay solution, battery is extremely important to me. I'm considering just springing for a 120gb SSD or waiting until the 240gb SSD's come down a bit (I won't spend more than 250 max) and then when I need more storage (which isn't often) just getting a slim 500gb external HDD to hold movies/anime/music/pictures etc that I don't need on the go.
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I get 8-9 hours battery life with an SSD-HDD combo, but the HDD only holds music so it isnt used often. But that was with wifi, bluetooth, keyboard and display on about half.
 
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