Replace optical drive with HDD on 2007 SR MBP?

[theman]

I have a late 2007 santa rosa MBP, with a 120GB hard drive. I'm looking to get some more storage space, and I thought it would be cool to replace the superdrive with some high capacity hard drive. It would save me the work of having to reinstall OS X, and I really just need some extra file storage space. As far as I can tell though, the superdrive in this MBP uses the parallel ATA (IDE) interface, rather than SATA, which would be a drawback.

So questions.... is there really just one SATA port on this model? are there any decent high capacity IDE notebook hard drives? If I'm just using the drive for file storage, not the OS, would this even be noticeable (especially if I got a 7200rpm drive)? How difficult would it be to replace the superdrive with an HDD on this model?

thanks all.

EDIT: Is there any point in getting this thing?

Is there a cheaper way to adapt from SATA to IDE? (Rather than $100)

 

[Time Less]

it's fairly easy to do it yourself. i had an early 08 and used this caddy to hold my original hdd and put an ssd in it's place.

this ifixit guide helped a lot.

the downside to this method is that the hdd will not spindown at all. it's constantly running so your battery is gonna take a hit.

 

[theman]

wait, why does the hard drive not spin down? sounds like a malfunction...