I decided to add a second hard drive to my 17” Unibody MacBook Pro. To do this I purchased an OptiBay adapter from MCE Technologies. This adapter replaces the built DVD drive in the MacBook Pro. I rarely use it so it is no big loss to remove it. In doing so I gain another 500GB of storage bringing my total storage to 1TB. MCE Technologies also sells an enclosure which allows the DVD drive you removed to be used as external USB drive. I happened to purchase the OptiBay while they were giving away this enclosure for free with purchase.
The installation was pretty straight forward and simple. I mistakenly removed a connector from the system-board which I didn’t have too. It made my heart race a little since it was a delicate connector and I was having difficulty reconnecting it. That particular connector is what connects to the display so I was worried i just hosed the laptop, luckily I didn’t. My only gripe was that it uses two less screws to connect to the chassis then the original DVD drive did. They user the cover to help hold everything together and keep things from moving. Also one less screw could be used to affix the Bluetooth antenna to the OptiBay adapter instead of the two that was originally used to attach to the DVD drive. The attached video is of me installing the OptiBay.
Good job.
I have same laptop to you.
Really helpful for me.
Thanks.
Thanks for the video!
Have you noticed if the MacBook gets hotter than with one drive, or if the battery does not last as long?
And what happens if you “disconnect” the 2nd drive in Finder – does it spin down and not use any power? I guess it can still be re-mounted using Disk Utility?
Thinking about adding a 1TB drive to the 320GB I have. Then I can have my entire image archive with me at all times 🙂
Sorry about the late response. I have not noticed any temperature increase when both drives are in the unit. I have not tried to spin the drive down by un-mounting it. I would guess you would get minimal additional battery life by doing it as the drive still has power going to it even though the drive is not spinning. I have not had any issues doing this since I installed the second drive.
How about the battery life? increase / decrease ?
No real change, if anything a minimal increase in battery life as the OS is on the SSD. So most reads and writes came off the low power consumption SSD rather than the hard drive.