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MCE Optibay & Intel SSD

Awesome info, guys. Thanks!

I think I'm going to forgo SMS and put the stock HDD in the SD Bay, SSD in the HDD Bay. Particularly now that I'll have a 17" MBP, I believe I'll be making more use of hibernation than SMS since I don't plan on traveling with it too much.
 
Great thread since I will do exactly the same thing for the new mbp.

optibay - ssd intel x25-m <--soon to be the boot/osx drive
hdd bay - original apple 500gb drive

i don't care really about hibernate mode, i would either shutdown or sleep.
 
Seeing as it looks like the use of an SSD constitutes going all out price wise anyway :p if I weren't too worried about spending the extra on the storage drive, I take it something like the SMS protection in one of the scorpio blacks would work in the superdrive bay hence I could keep some SMS protection... Feel free to correct if I'm wrong.

Also can you please suggest a good brand of high performance SSD, as many seem to use the Intel ones yet a lot of benchmarks seem to favour the OCZ Vertex 2?
 
Stock HD

Does the stock 500GB HD in the unibody MBP 17" (Hitatchi 5k500.b) have built-in SMS or use the bay's SMS?
 
So, I run an OCZ SSD in my HD bay, and a WD Scorpio Blue 500GB in the super drive bay. Great setup... until the 500GB drive failed a couple days ago. The drive was about a year and a half old, so about halfway through its expected life. I suspect, but have no way to prove, this was due to not having SMS.

So, my advice... take the advice of this thread, get a scorpio black with SMS support. Serial number ending in BJKT
 
Stock HD in superdrive bay

So If I simply open up my macbook pro, move my stock hdd (Hitachi HTS545032B9SA02, 320gb) to the superdrive bay (using an optibay, or other caddy) and then put an SSD in the normal hdd bay, and use the ssd as my startup disk, I won't have any problems with sleep/wake, still have proper hibernation, and not have any problems regarding the sudden motion sensor?

Thanks in advance,
R.
 
OS on SSD in OptiBay and Hibernate

danbt79 said:
6) Hibernate will no longer function correctly if your boot drive is in the Superdrive Bay. You must disable hibernation using these instructions:
http://www.macworld.com/article/53471/2006/10/sleepmode.html
Click to expand...

I found a solution for the OptiBay SSD standby / sleep / hibernate problem.
Update: My first approach was to move the hibernate file to another disk. Unfortunately this does not work. You can disable hibernate during standby by setting the hibernate mode to sleep. This is described in this blog post.
 
Last edited:
Windows Hibernate Problem?

Hi Everyone,

Great thread gave me all the info I needed.

Just wondering if anybody can tell me if Windows experiences the same hibernate problem that Mac does when the SSD is installed in the SuperBay and your booting from it?

Cheers.
 
First of all, I doff my hat to danbt79, tenderidol, almallossi for the very comprehensive informative advice and procedure explaining the pros and cons.

almalossi said:
I believe I have found a the cause and a solution to this issue:

When going into hibernate mode or sleep & hibernate mode (the default) the mac is writing a sleep image to disk from where it can then resume. The issue I believe is that Mac OS is trying to be smart and is already powering down parts of your macbook (e.g. the display, the dvd drive, etc...) while writing the sleep file to your system disk in the background. An obvious problem now occurs if your system disk is where Mac OS actually expects the DVD drive to be. It is powering down the same disk it is busy writing the sleep image to.

The easy solution to this problem is to move the location of the sleep image to the drive in the built-in HDD bay using the command:

sudo pmset -a hibernatefile /Volumes/<volumename>/.sleepimage

First tests suggest that this works. Try it out and let me know about your experiences.

Edited:
Please use with caution!!!! The manpage of pmset says


which this solution clearly violates. However, my tests suggest that resuming from the hibernatefile on the disk in the HDD bay works even if it's not the root volume.

AlMalossi
Click to expand...

i just got my OCZ Vortex2 2.5" 60G SSD. and got my equivalent MCE optibay equivalent from the far east (Here)

after digesting the various options, i have two paths, and would like to ask for your opinion.

option1: SDD in Macbook's Primary Hard Drive Slot, switching SMS off and buy a SMS able 7200rpm in the optibay.

option2: as Dan suggested SSD in optibay leaving the mechanical rotating device in the primary slot. and apply changing the hibernate sleep image to the clog works. (any feedback of success going down this road please?)

my question is, which will enhance better performance out of my first gen uMacBk running 10.6.7 @ 64bit? but still preserve and minimise the write cycles to the SSD. I plan to migrate only OSX and the application folder. leaving the home folder and any application depended S/L in clog work. i wish to apply writing to the sleep image to the clog work even with option1. any pros or cons doing so?

would future software upgrades. "reset" all the customised configuration back to how apple wants things done?

thanks a million
h:apple:
 
Last edited:
mac8867 said:
So, I run an OCZ SSD in my HD bay, and a WD Scorpio Blue 500GB in the super drive bay. Great setup... until the 500GB drive failed a couple days ago. The drive was about a year and a half old, so about halfway through its expected life. I suspect, but have no way to prove, this was due to not having SMS.

So, my advice... take the advice of this thread, get a scorpio black with SMS support. Serial number ending in BJKT
Click to expand...

So the optibay doesn't have a SMS? I can't find a hard drive that is built in SMS.
I was wondering can the HDD in optibay can be able to use the main bay SMS!?
 
almalossi said:
I believe I have found a the cause and a solution to this issue:

When going into hibernate mode or sleep & hibernate mode (the default) the mac is writing a sleep image to disk from where it can then resume. The issue I believe is that Mac OS is trying to be smart and is already powering down parts of your macbook (e.g. the display, the dvd drive, etc...) while writing the sleep file to your system disk in the background. An obvious problem now occurs if your system disk is where Mac OS actually expects the DVD drive to be. It is powering down the same disk it is busy writing the sleep image to.

The easy solution to this problem is to move the location of the sleep image to the drive in the built-in HDD bay using the command:

sudo pmset -a hibernatefile /Volumes/<volumename>/.sleepimage

First tests suggest that this works. Try it out and let me know about your experiences.

Edited:
Please use with caution!!!! The manpage of pmset says


which this solution clearly violates. However, my tests suggest that resuming from the hibernatefile on the disk in the HDD bay works even if it's not the root volume.

AlMalossi
Click to expand...

AlMalossi, thanks for this! It should have been obvious to experienced Unix guys, so well spotted! Is this solution now working for you?
 
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