Thinking about MCE optibay mod - Warranty issue

[thesmoth]

Question for the optibay people:

My machine is only 5-6 months old and I bought 3 years of apple care, and I know that doing the optibay mod will VOID your warranty IF apple finds out. There is no way I want to be without my warranty since I paid for it, and repairing a macbook pro out of pocket is insane.

If your computer were to crap out would it be easy to drop the optical drive back in without apple noticing? It wouldn't cause any scratching or damage that they could see? I know this is an easy mod to do and i'm confident I can do it, but i'm worried that they could tell that the optical drive was tampered with and then void your warranty.

Also could I put the SSD in the regular hard drive space, and the bigger regular hard disc in the optibay? Does it matter which drive goes where when you unmount say the regular hard disc and want to just use the SSD for your main drive?

Does the optibay have a rubber thing like the regular drive area so that it will dampen vibrations?

 

[rgarjr]

If you're real careful with the install and re-intall you can't tell that you had one installed. Even if they do notice, you can always deny it. Yeah you can put a regular HDD on the caddy or on the hard drive space, doesn't matter. The optibay caddies don't have the rubbing thing you are talking about.

I just recently dumped a 640GB drive on my caddy for storage purpose.

 

[thesmoth]

If you're real careful with the install and re-intall you can't tell that you had one installed. Even if they do notice, you can always deny it. Yeah you can put a regular HDD on the caddy or on the hard drive space, doesn't matter. The optibay caddies don't have the rubbing thing you are talking about.

I just recently dumped a 640GB drive on my caddy for storage purpose.

Ah I see.

So it would be best to put the SSD into the optibay since there are no moving parts and no vibrations (since there are no rubber vibration dampners), and put the regular HD into the normal spot so that the vibrations are dampened.

So as far as configuring which drive is your main drive it doesn't matter where you put them?

 

[angemon89]

Ah I see.

So it would be best to put the SSD into the optibay since there are no moving parts and no vibrations (since there are no rubber vibration dampners), and put the regular HD into the normal spot so that the vibrations are dampened.

So as far as configuring which drive is your main drive it doesn't matter where you put them?

I was wondering about this too.

Also, how complicated is it having 2 hard drives? If I understand correctly the secondary drive will show up on your desktop just like an external HD, right? And you can't have anything in your Home folders, correct? Sounds a bit annoying.

 

[rgarjr]

if you're worried about having vibration from your HDD on the optibay caddy, then you can put the SSD in it.

I have my HDD on the caddy and I don't really notice any vibes.

 

[thesmoth]

if you're worried about having vibration from your HDD on the optibay caddy, then you can put the SSD in it.

I have my HDD on the caddy and I don't really notice any vibes.

So i can just copy my itunes library, files, movies, pictures, etc... into to regular HD, and then use the SSD for my boot drive and programs and stuff, and you can unmount the regular HD when you aren't using it to save battery?

 

[rgarjr]

Yep, u can just go into disk utility and un-mount and the drive will spin down.

 

[thesmoth]

I've heard of a cheaper alternative to the MCE optibay that is about half the cost. Is this one as good?

I really like that the MCE optibay comes with the external drive enclosure so I can use it VIA USB still. I'm guessing the cheaper one doesn't come with the optical drive enclosure.

 

[Macshroomer]

What ever you decide your boot drive is to be, leave that drive in the regular HDD slot, do not put it in the optical slot. Also consider reading this thread from about page 20 onward:

https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/680228/

I went with the Optibay set up because this computer is my lively hood, I don't skimp and it is a tax write off. I love the DVD enclosure that came with it, it is smaller than the Superdrive for the MacBook Air...

 

[thesmoth]

Ah, that is a new questions for me. Time machine...

So since the one drive will just be files, i guess you don't need time machine for it and you can just drag and drop those files to your external drive.

And your main drive can still be backed up using time machine like normal (just leave the extra drive unmounted when doing it I guess...)

 

[thesmoth]

This sounds really good. I think when the 160 gig intel drives come down to around 200-300 i'll try this mod out.

Sucks that the quality of the external cd drive enclosure that comes with the MCE optibay sucks, but at least it isn't wasted and you don't have to buy an external drive.

 

[Macshroomer]

Sucks that the quality of the external cd drive enclosure that comes with the MCE optibay sucks, but at least it isn't wasted and you don't have to buy an external drive.

Where did you hear this? It is fine, it works, it is really slim and is easy to install. Maybe it is just me and I look at my computer related gear as tools more than toys, dunno...