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Space wasted by optical drive

lilcosco08

lilcosco08

macrumors 65816
Original poster
May 27, 2010
1,224
22
Dayton
FkpKKrqQlYsgNBq6.medium

Credits go to iFixit for the picture


Just thought I'd post this picture.

OD is just about as big as the logic board, ditch it and we can see some powerful stuff.

Or Steve could just ditch the logic board, and we can have another optical drive. :p
 
Last edited:
Don't know why you couldn't add onto the other thread(s) about this.
Remove it and put in an optibay.
 
Funny, I was just thinking about this the other day. I mean I've had my MBP for about 2 years now, and I have used the optical drive maybe 5 times ...
 
To all people saying "just install another hard drive", most people don't need or want another hard drive. Who wants more than 1TB in a laptop?

Wouldn't it be better to see some serious increase in power and battery life? I mean, there is room in there for another computer for gods sakes! The optical drive isn't worth it when instead the MBP 13" could become seriously powerful.
 
noodlemanc said:
To all people saying "just install another hard drive", most people don't need or want another hard drive. Who wants more than 1TB in a laptop?

Wouldn't it be better to see some serious increase in power and battery life? I mean, there is room in there for another computer for gods sakes! The optical drive isn't worth it when instead the MBP 13" could become seriously powerful.
Click to expand...

I use 2 drives to speed up my computer..

the SSD to for boot and applications
and the 640 HDD for the user directory (basically everything else)

With that my boot time averages 15 seconds, sometimes more and sometimes less.
 
lilcosco08 said:
IMO I'd rather see extended battery/faster gpu/cpu than another drive
Click to expand...

Well you may get your wish. If apple applies the changes to the MBA to the MBP line you may see the disappearance of the optical drive.

Personally, while I may not use the optical drive very much, but there have been circumstances to when I do need it. So I'll probably not go the optibay route at this stage. Maybe next year, I'll take the plunge and get a usb dvd drive for those rare times I do need it and slap another SSD into the drive bay.
 
noodlemanc said:
Wouldn't it be better to see some serious increase in power and battery life? I mean, there is room in there for another computer for gods sakes! The optical drive isn't worth it when instead the MBP 13" could become seriously powerful.
Click to expand...

agree with this. if the current 13" mbp had an i5 with separate graphics card i'd have had one by now. sticking with my mb till they do.

of course now that the mba has the higher res screen - thats been added to my 13" mbp minimum spec too:D

appreciate it might be a long wait
 
if the optical drive is removed what will people do who burn home movies, etc?
 
Sucks that those mini-cd's never got huge ... those things are like a 1/3 of the size of regular cd's
 
TheBaconKing said:
Thats why you remove it and install a second Hard Drive
Click to expand...

yeah, but a hard drive is still significantly smaller than the optical drive. i don't know about you, but personally, i'd like to not have ANY wasted space in a laptop that i pay $3k for.

we could have two hard drives AND extra battery or CPU/GPU power if apple removed the ODs.
 
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noodlemanc said:
To all people saying "just install another hard drive", most people don't need or want another hard drive. Who wants more than 1TB in a laptop?
Click to expand...

The same people who wanted more than 640 Kilobytes of RAM in their desktop computer.
 
chiefroastbeef said:
He maybe referring to the poster who said to put a SSD in the main bay for fast boot/app opening times, and another drive in the opti bay.

I too had a 500gb drive in my optibay, it fits my usage very well. I too never turn off my computer, I sleep it when I get on a flight or anywhere else.
Click to expand...
I also never shutdown my MPB. I can imagine the focus on boot time given the Steve Jobs message, but the real value of the SSD is fast application launch, file opening, searches and virtual memory.
 
noodlemanc said:
To all people saying "just install another hard drive", most people don't need or want another hard drive. Who wants more than 1TB in a laptop?

Wouldn't it be better to see some serious increase in power and battery life? I mean, there is room in there for another computer for gods sakes! The optical drive isn't worth it when instead the MBP 13" could become seriously powerful.
Click to expand...

I don't think anyone is disagreeing with you here. It's just that as Apple has not (yet) removed the od, you might as well sort it as best you can yourself now with the Optibay, or OWC's Data Doubler.

The second drive option is not all about capacity, but rather flexibility. And yes, there still is A LOT of wasted space, even with the bulky bracket and second HDD, so yes plenty of room for extra battery gpu etc.

I personally think we'll get SSD standard on all MBPs on the next revision. Actually 'flash' chips ala MBA so it too can be thinner and lighter.
 
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