Hacking in a second hard drive in a MacBook Pro

I've thought about doing something similar on my early 2008 MBP but there it would be a lot of work. What this thread highlights more than anything is just how improved the ne MBP are mechanically. It says something that we now have three or four third party solutions for such upgrades that are fairly easy to install.

Now all we need to see from Apple is the application of these design smarts to the iMac and Mini. Actually the iMac ought to have a second bay anyways, but that is likely an even bigger stretch.


Dave

Ha! Yes, everything old is new again. MANY (most?) laptops used to do this. I had a Compaq laptop (I forget the exact year, but it was a 120 MHz Pentium, so 1996 or so?) that had a sled on one side that could be either a second battery or a second hard drive. (Or leave both out and save weight.) Back when hard drives were 500MB-200GB and battery life was 1-2 hours this was much more important. :-) Countless Dells (even in the last few years) also had swappable optical/floppy drives.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multibay

there are shorter SATA cables. and why not learn to solder and cover the splice with shrink tubing to make a less hack-ish power connector.

This is a hack at best.

A quality job would have used a drive sled, like the newmodeus, mce optibay, or one of the IBM ones.

Oh and nothing new. Similar things have been done for years. I believe one of the early unibody MacBook Pro installs of this is documented well on MacRumors.

i always see HDDs, but my battery life is not enough to get me where i want to go on a graphically intense workday away from power.

Why has no one made an optical drive -> battery replacement, to add a second battery? 4 hrs of light use and 1.5-2hrs of heavy use is not enough for me and i can't afford a new MBP.

The best & cheapest way to do this is with the newmodeus HDD SATA caddy at 42$ :
http://newmodeus.com/shop/index.php?main_page=product_info&cPath=2_27&products_id=220

Fits perfectly in an unibody MBP (9.5mm w/ SATA interface), just have to remove the black plastic cover before installing it.

Hmmm, I wonder if you could use that to have a RAID 0 setup on your MBP?

Or you could just do this: http://www.mcetech.com/optibay/

This isn't anything new: http://www.mcetech.com/optibay/

In fact I'd rather use the Optibay as you get an easy way to make the DVD drive external as well. That and it would seem to be a lot safer.

Or do it the easy way...
http://store.mcetech.com/Merchant2/merchant.mvc?Screen=CTGY&Category_Code=STORHDLTMBOB

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