Replacing optical drive with SSD on Macbook

[theLaika]

Has anyone had a lot of success with replacing the existing DVD drive with a Solid State Drive, if so, would my Early-2008 Core 2 Duo T8300 w/ 4 GB RAM/250GB HD be suitable for the operation. Moreover, is it worth it?

 

[iThinkergoiMac]

It's worth it if you think it is. It's an upgrade I plan on doing sometime, just waiting for the funds to be there.

Any MacBook will benefit from an SSD upgrade, and combining an SSD with a magnetic drive is a great way to save space and keep down the price.

 

[smithrh]

I think OWC has a kit for this, and I'm interested in doing this myself as I rarely use the drive.

Hopefully someone that's done this will chime in. When I replaced the RAM on my MacBook a few days ago, I looked around the optical assembly and it didn't appear to be a real tough thing to do...

 

[theLaika]

consensus online on other forums and places suggests http://www.mcetech.com/ as producing a good hard drive enclosure. From what I see, they don't sell combined with SSDs but I'd personally like to buy mine myself anyway. They also seem to give away adapters to turn existing internal optical drive into an external USB one.

I'm not sure, apart from explosive startup times, how much actual benefit I'll get out of these things. I was interested in setting up the SSD as a Photoshop scratch disk - again, I have no idea how this would benefit me but I'd assume a modest/awesome calculation increase.
This idea should fester.

 

[Santabean2000]

Have done this. Works very very well. Desktop capabilities on the go. Love it.

 

[theLaika]

Have done this. Works very very well. Desktop capabilities on the go. Love it.

Where did you get parts and such?

 

[Santabean2000]

Where did you get parts and such?

I used the OWC Data Doubler and 8GB RAM also from OWC. (Great company, highly recommended.) All shipped out of States, just in case you're livin abroad too.
The SSD is an Intel 160GB Gen 2.
OWC make instructional videos which you can easily find on YouTube. So simple after watching these. They also include screwdrivers and pry tool as part of package with DD.
Other things I used incl a external enclosure for 2.5" drives and Carbon Copy Cloner, (a free app).

 

[zgotts]

I'm looking into doing this with the OptiBay, so figured I'd continue this thread.

I'm pretty certain I am going to do it, my one hang up is that the MacBook I'd adding the SSD to is only a 2.16 ghz Core 2 Duo processor.

Will there still be a significant improvement? does the processor speed even matter here?

And will running two internal drives cause these older models any heat problems?

Thanks!