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I know, I was speaking to a comment peapody made about the newmodus being so heavy duty...its a 9-10 ounce HDD. Hell, a popsicle stick would hold it fine. Not like the drive is under any stress.

I had a lot of movement with my other two caddies compared to the doubler..I'm just speaking from experience. I had a great deal of vibration and I don't know if it's because of the caddies but I have had a faulty data connection that required apple care replacement within the last week of the connector cable. It makes me very suspicious of my optibay set up. Just got the doubler in and it's world better in quality. Here's hoping I wont have the same problem.
 
MaxUpgrades Ext Optical drive enclosure

Does anyone have a picture of the back of the MaxUpgrades External Superdrive enclosure that comes with the optical bay kit? Is the USB cable fixed or could i use any length cable?

Thanks
 
Thanks to blink487 and others for keeping this thread going. I've read through it in its entirety.

I noticed that nimitz** has two different $28.99 "2nd HDD caddy Apple OptiBay SuperDrive Replacement SATA" listings:

My question is, which one should I buy for my 2011 15" MBP?

P.S. I bought my MBP from Amazon on June 3 and can confirm it does have SATA 3 6Gbps in both drive bays.

I mailed nimitz about this, here is his reply:

The normal version fits poor. it has not the holes to fix the caddy.
see pictures: http://img.auctiva.com/imgdata/3/4/5/0/2/7/webimg/477372499_tp.jpg
you should buy the special version for your macbook 2011.
regards.


- nimitz**
 
Yep, I'm gonna buy another one when I decide to SSD+Optibay my old 2008 aluminum Macbook. Anybody wanna buy a Maxupgrades optibay? lol
 
Does anyone have a picture of the back of the MaxUpgrades External Superdrive enclosure that comes with the optical bay kit? Is the USB cable fixed or could i use any length cable?

Thanks

The cable is soldered to the board inside. You will also probably have to remove the dust skirt to get it to function correctly.
 
I, as many before me, have decided to purchase a 2nd HDD caddy from nimitz (special design) but now I'm wondering what to do with my optical drive. What's a good enclosure?
 
I, as many before me, have decided to purchase a 2nd HDD caddy from nimitz (special design) but now I'm wondering what to do with my optical drive. What's a good enclosure?

http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=200616550174&ssPageName=STRK:MESELX:IT

this put a smile on my face. working like a charm looks like the genuine one



i like many others have put in a second harddrive in my MB5,1. i originally bought the one that has the FENVI Label on it. it worked like a dream with my OCZ SSD, no problem at all, no lose parts or noise as the SSD is not spinning in the optibay.

i then bought another one see attached, physcially have the missing holes as per the optical drive that came with the MB. i swapped that one in, hoping that would be more muscular. and it did hold the drive in very rigidly and it would just work. however, having the same SSD with the same OSX, it was very upset, first it didnt know where to boot on the apple icon jumping to the folder, i pressed OPTION to boot, it saw the drive, but won't boot. i tried a few more times, it finally went into OSX. but no application ran on the new Caddy, even firefox and safari just jumps on the dock and spit out with the error reporting, then OSX just quit altogether. obviously i went back to the fenvi caddy, no problem at all. anyone had these kind of troubles?

then i took both Caddy out and dissembled both units. looked at the PCBs on both the latter one have two resistors on some of the pin lines (e.g. pin5 from the left) that the one that works do not. the one on the right seems to be a 0 ohm resistor. but i don't have an ohm meter, so i dunno. any ideas??

obviously best of both world is to have the working PCB with the rigid Caddy, but i had to return the rigid one becoz simply it wasn't reliable pushing data out to me MB.
 

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That bottom one seems to be soldered together by a complete retard :eek:
The missing resistors means that those lines are not connected to each other at all. In other words there's an infinite resistance between those lines. If the one that works is the one without the resistors, you could try to remove the resistors from the bottom one.
 
That bottom one seems to be soldered together by a complete retard :eek:
The missing resistors means that those lines are not connected to each other at all. In other words there's an infinite resistance between those lines. If the one that works is the one without the resistors, you could try to remove the resistors from the bottom one.

i concur... i would believe the top one (fenvi) is machined. bottom one (e-Sun) hand soldered and very badly done. obviously fenvi is more expensive than the e-Sun one. Again, i don't have an ohm meter. the track seems to indicate resistors R1 and R2 are in parallel. but R1 is printed 0. only to believe it is a 0ohm. The other single resistor seem like, anyone have with the SATA connector pin 5, and with that resistor, what is the purpose? why is it making OSX crash? and why would they do it that way? to create a low pass RC (with really ***** capacitance on the connector)?
 
So I've read the last ten pages or so and it seems everyone is going to the nimitz one on ebay. Before I pluck down $30 bucks and wait three weeks for it to arrive, can someone confirm the SATA1/SATAII issue. One person reported it only getting SATAI speeds and reflecting as such in system profiler. Can anyone else confirm or deny these claims. I would like to not sacrifice speed for price.

Thanks,
 
I got the special design one for the MBP. It runs at SATAII speeds in my computer. And my computer only has a SATAII link speed. No idea whether it can run SATAIII though.
 
I got the special design one for the MBP. It runs at SATAII speeds in my computer. And my computer only has a SATAII link speed. No idea whether it can run SATAIII though.

mine is NOT the nimtiz one.

Fenvi is the label, it runs at SATA2. not sure about SATA3, don't have the beer tokens for the 2011 models.
 
So I've read the last ten pages or so and it seems everyone is going to the nimitz one on ebay. Before I pluck down $30 bucks and wait three weeks for it to arrive, can someone confirm the SATA1/SATAII issue. One person reported it only getting SATAI speeds and reflecting as such in system profiler. Can anyone else confirm or deny these claims. I would like to not sacrifice speed for price.

Thanks,

Yeah one person said nimitz said they can only confirm SATAI but a thousand others in this thread have said over and over it does SATAII.
 
MaxUpgrades Optibay install report

So I went ahead with the MaxUpgrades. Some instructions would have been helpful, but its not that hard, even for an inexperienced person like myself.

I splurged for the OWC Mercury Extreme SATA III drive and its showing 6GB through the optical bay. The standard HDD is still in its original space. I haven't yet installed OS X and made the SDD bootable, but that's next.

That being said, i think the optibay frame seems very solid. There were 2 screws to connect the drive to the frame and then 3 screws to connect the SATAIII connector to the frame. I transferred the small removable screw socket from the superdrive to the frame and was able to get all three screws installed to hold the contraption into the MBP body.

One quirk from what i'd seen in my web searches: there's a little bit of tape holding down the thin wire (the camera connector cable). So it not possible to disconnect it and lift it out of the way. Luckily there's enough slack to get the drive in and out.

I'm pleased with the external enclosure for the Superdrive. Its just plastic, but it works fine for me, once i got the drive jammed in there and the bottom snapped on and squished into place. I haven't tried using the DVD Player App yet to see if i can get it to work.
 
Yeah one person said nimitz said they can only confirm SATAI but a thousand others in this thread have said over and over it does SATAII.

The optibay caddy is just a link, it will have the same link speed as your mbp port.
 
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