SSD and HDD (OptiBay): Battery & Fans & Other

[moootah]

I wanna buy an OptiBay and move my 500GB HDD to the optical drive slot and use a 120GB SSD as my primary drive for the system and the apps (leaving the home folder at the HDD).

If you have this set up and experiences, would you try to answer my questions?:

1. How is the battery life affected in real life? I understand that you now run two drives and that will account to some battery drain.
2. I've heard that fans can go like crazy with this set up. Is that correct?
3. Do you think it's safe to buy "cheaper" alternatives? Such as this one? Or do you have good experience with some other "cheap" ones?

Thanks!

 

[dusk007]

1. Not really much of a difference.
2. Why should it. With the SSD you can work faster so the CPU may have a bit more to do while it used to wait and wait and wait all the time for the HDD.
An SSD produces practically no heat.
3. Definitely get the cheaper ones. The expensive stuff from OWC & Co are just stickers on the same thing which is effectively nothing more than an mSATA to SATA adapter. I think those expensive ones are borderline fraud.

 

[mbmobile]

The battery consumption will have a little impact, I will advice to put the SSD in the optibay in order to maintain the free fall sensor active in the HD.

Regarding your optibay choice on amazon, no comment, read the reviews and decide for yourself. My only experience has been with the OWC optibay, and it has been excellent.

 

[T5BRICK]

Your battery life will take a hit. You can mitigate this a little by setting the drive to spin down when not in use. A larger SSD would help as well. I went with a 256GB drive and I've got enough space for my 90GB music library.

If I recall correctly, your fans may spin up because of the HDD in the optical bay slot. smcFanControl can help here. It'll allow you to control the fan speeds.

And cheap optical bay adapters are fine. As far as I know there isn't a whole lot of difference between the $10 ones and the $70 ones.

 

[moootah]

I will advice to put the SSD in the optibay in order to maintain the free fall sensor active in the HD.

I've heard that it's recommended to have the drive with the system in the "default" slot (e.g. where's currently the HDD). Are there any real advantages to that or people are just sain that?

 

[mbmobile]

I've heard that it's recommended to have the drive with the system in the "default" slot (e.g. where's currently the HDD). Are there any real advantages to that or people are just sain that?

Again, maintaining the HDD in its original slot will permit to continue to use the free fall sensor.

On my MBP 2010, I've kept the 500GB hd in its original slot and the SSD in the optibay for 2 years. Never had a single problem.

 

[dusk007]

I've heard that it's recommended to have the drive with the system in the "default" slot (e.g. where's currently the HDD). Are there any real advantages to that or people are just sain that?

People are saying that because in the early 2011 MBPs only the default slot had SATA 6G. And even after a firmware upgrade the optical bay sata slot was reported as buggy.
I don't see any technical reason why the same should hold true for late 2011 or 2012 MBPs or anything older like 2010 and earlier. For the system an sata port is just a port it doesn't care where the system drive is. I have never heard of a system that actually cares where a drive is plugged it. The port must work (preferably full speed) and not be broken that is all.

The free fall sensor, the rubber mounting and the better noise dampening all say put the spinning drive into the main bay.

 

[andyjslin]

Sorry for hijacking this thread.

I have ordered the OWC kit (drive and bay) and was planning to have my Intel SSD 330 series (with the SF-chipset bug) in the default slot while moving my hd to the OWC drive bay. Would this be alright?

I have the mid 2009 MBP so my SATA ports arent that fancy.