Filed under: Hardware, Hacks, Odds and ends, Macbook Pro
Hacking in a second hard drive in a MacBook Pro
Need more hard drive space in your MacBook Pro? Well, if you're not scared to get your hands dirty with a little hacking, and not too attached to your DVD drive, you can hack your way to twice the hard drives.
This particular user faced a dilemma when purchasing his new MacBook Pro: get the faster SSD hard drive or the larger capacity rotational drive. Instead of settling on either of those options, he removed his DVD drive, hacked together an adapter to interface with the proprietary Apple connector, and installed a second hard drive. The result is a "best of both worlds" scenario for him; a faster boot time and responsiveness, and plenty of space available for movies and music.
He posted several pictures and instructions if you're ready to take the plunge into a dual-hard-drive notebook. There is some harsh language in the post, so you may not want to open this at work.
Any hacks like this should be performed only by skilled users. This will void your warranty, folks, so proceed at your own risk.
[via Hack A Day]
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Todd Wright said 10:44AM on 8-24-2009
Or do it the easy way...
http://store.mcetech.com/Merchant2/merchant.mvc?Screen=CTGY&Category_Code=STORHDLTMBOB
@toddw - Twitter
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jonaz.lundberg said 12:31PM on 8-28-2009
Does the Optibay solution work in the new (mid 2009) Macbook Pro 13"?
RCook said 10:54AM on 8-24-2009
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.
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John said 10:45AM on 8-24-2009
Or you could just do this: http://www.mcetech.com/optibay/
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Ryan Trevisol said 10:58AM on 8-24-2009
Hmmm, I wonder if you could use that to have a RAID 0 setup on your MBP?
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mr kitty said 11:06AM on 8-24-2009
@Ryan
Yes, yes you can. I've got 2x500 GB HDDs installed in my 2009 Mac mini compliments of MCE Tech (noted by all the commentators above you).
I used Disk Utility during install to stripe the two together (RAID 0) for a 1TB volume / 931 GB of usable space.
It is now connected to my HDTV (via mini displayport) and quite happy.
Ryan Trevisol said 11:26AM on 8-24-2009
Sounds awesome, but I wonder about the battery life in a laptop. . . probably equivalent to having the cd running all the time.
mmendoza27 said 3:01PM on 8-24-2009
Ryan, there is actually some benchmarks of people who install dual-Intel SSD (2x160 GB Gen 1 SSDs) and run them in RAID 0. The speeds are pretty sick.
mr kitty said 6:36PM on 9-14-2009
There would be a battery hit equivalent to the power required for a second HDD, but that is no where NEAR the power requirement of continually spinning an optical drive.
7200 RPM drives would give you better read/write performance, sacrifice the battery life. 5400 RPM drives would give you slower read/write but better battery life. Turn on "put hard drives to sleep when possible" in energy saver to minimize the hit.
Western Digital just announced 12.5mm 1TB 2.5" SATA drives. Those **might** fit into an optical drive replacement tray (like the OptiBay kits from MCE). They wouldn't fit into the primary drive slot, tho.
Ultimately it's going to be a trade off depending on what you need... throughput speed or battery performance.
Bruf said 11:43AM on 8-24-2009
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.
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Joseph said 12:01PM on 8-24-2009
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.
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Travis Walls said 12:09PM on 8-24-2009
I'm sorry, but I can't resist. Dell used to do exactly what you're asking for on their older laptops. I can't even begin to pretend to understand what these engineers must go through to try to cram everything into a tiny laptop case, but, that said, I wish they could have figured out a way to keep that swappable battery/optical drive concept alive.
Joseph said 3:29PM on 9-04-2009
@travis
exactly.
Only for me, no need to swap. Just want to configure it to be better.
Inter said 6:05PM on 8-24-2009
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.
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john said 1:29PM on 8-24-2009
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.
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brian said 12:19AM on 8-25-2009
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
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David Frantz said 9:28AM on 8-25-2009
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
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