Dual Hard Drives in MacBooks and MBPs

DJ Life & Community General Discussion
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Dual Hard Drives in MacBooks and MBPs

I’m not sure that many are familiar with the option to install two hard drives in the Mac Books.

The way to do it is to get OptiBay expansion module:

EDIT: or another option suggested by Photojojo: Other World Computing - DDMB5KT1.0 Item Not Found

It allows you to replace the internal Optical Drive with a second 2.5" hard drive. The OptiBay package for $99 also includes an external USB2 enclosure for the built-in optical drive. That’s a very smart upgrade IMO!

One of the best applications of this is that it allows you to get a cheap and small SSD drive (128GB or even 64GB) for OS, Applications, Settings and Temp Files, and add a large 640G or 750G spinning platter drive @5400 for your music files and other media content. The SSD provides significant improvement for general OS & App load times and run-time operation. The seek time and the random access speed is amazing. On the other side, it is sort of a waste to keep large music collections and other static content on SSD drives.

Having 2 drives has one more very important benefit - balancing the load. If your OS or Traktor/Ableton or any other running app needs to load a new library, or do some big caching operation or anything else, it eats a lot of I/O, with (usually) very high priority. If at the same time you need you Real Time music application to load a new audio file or access other data, it has to wait - bye, bye real time. The OS always takes precedence. With two drives, the impact is almost gone. I/O hungry OS & App operations wont impact the real-time access to the music files, and vice versa - accessing large music files will not impact the OS & App operation on the main drive. Well, it’s not absolutely no impact, but pretty close.

There is one more thing to be mentioned: Power consumption with two drives. It will increase for sure! Still, if you put an SSD + a 5400 drive, it will be bearable. Both SSDs and 5400 are very economic and overall, it’d be almost as if you have a 7200 drive. Maybe a bit more, but still close.

This is great way to improve the overal stability and reliability of your setups for Music production. I think it’s wort!

Cheers!

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I’ve been eyeing this for a few years now. Will most definitely do this when I get my next computer! (:

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Didn’t know about this. Thanks for sharing.

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There are cheaper eBay alternatives aswell, (don;t know if they are any good though)

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I’ve been looking at this one.

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$179 for the bracket + 1TB drive is a great deal! The OWC plastic chassis is very good, as it will provide better vibrational isolation.

The DVD enclosure in the OptiBay package is also nice, but 99$ is relatively expensive :slight_smile:. Good to know there are cheaper alternatives!

Chris, will you be putting SSD as primary drive?

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I don’t know. I though about it, but that’s some serious $$ all together.

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I’ve seriously considered doing this. I need to call Apple and see what it does to the warranty…if it doesn’t affect the warranty, I’ll order one by the end of the week and they’ll be a standard instant upgrade in any future MBP I may purchase…like the one I’m getting in October when my warranty runs out.

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If you open up your MacBook to change non user changeable parts (hard drive battery etc) it will void your warranty,

If you got a fault on your logic board within warranty I can’t see Apple being to generous and covering it if you have got this installed,

I’m an ACMT and Apple are not the easiest to deal with

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Can someone verify this? Will it completely void the warranty or just the cover for the specific parts changed?

Also, have people had problems with 7200RPM drives causing vibrations or dramatically reducing battery life?

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Apple sees the harddrive as user-replaceable but the DVD-drive.. That’s where you void your warranty.

I bought a HDD caddy for my MPP 13" and it didn’t fit that well.. so I ended up with foam and gaffertape in my MBP. Works great, doesn’t come loose and no vibrations in the chassis (something I did experience with the caddy).

So my MBP is now rocking a 60GB Vertex2 in the original HDD bay and a 500GB 5400rpm Samsung in the DVD bay and it is lovely!
OSX on the SSD with the whole user folder moved to the conventional HDD for space-saving but all the programs still end up on the SSD by default. Which is nice!

Coldboot to desktop in 14 seconds, Photoshop CS5 loads up in 5 seconds and wow.. the UI system is really really fast:smiley:

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Cool! You kinda made my day :slight_smile:

any chance that you have a picture of how does it look like from the inside?

also, how is the ventilation of the spinning platter in your solution ?

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Ventilation isn’t a problem since the HDD doesn’t get hot or even close to hot.
Here are the insides of my MBP 13" mid 2009 model:

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Thanks, it looks quite OK :slight_smile:

I have the same model with the 2,26CPU. Will be looking at how to implement something custom and save the ~100EUR.

Cheers!

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eBay solved my problem for about €24 including shipping :wink:
Search for “optibay” and be sure it says it’s “SATA” and “9.5mm thick” in the advertisement.
If it doesn’t fit properly, take out the little PCB and tape it up like I did:slight_smile:

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I called Apple and while I couldn’t get a straight answer out of anyone, it seems that it does void the warranty to change the optical drive for a hard drive chassis. I’m still going to get around to contacting executive tech support to see if there’s a way to get away with it, 'cuz that’s bullshit.

Changing normal things like battery, hard drive, ram…those don’t void the warranty with any respectable vendor.

It’s really annoying. I haven’t used my internal optical drive for any legitimate use in a long time, and I don’t plan to. The thing is nothing but dead weight…broken dead weight, according to the last time I took my computer in for something. I told them not to fix it because they didn’t have one in the store and I’d have had to come back…screw that.

Heh…my first MacBook shipped with a dead optical drive and I didn’t notice for 6 weeks…and didn’t get it fixed for 8 months after that.

Seriously…what do people use optical dives for?

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have to agree there. I can’t remember the last time i used it for anything. A mate of mine covered his macbook in stickers and they went right over the opening for the Superdrive, not been a problem yet!

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I have a friend who put in the OWC tray and SSD drive. He absolutely loves it. It really does make a huge difference in booting and app launching time.

I’m personally holding out for SSD prices to come down. Be sure to get a decent drive that wont have problems with losing write speed over time.

As far as Apple warrantees go, I have had nothing short of great experiences with their customer support. I upgraded my HD on my old MBP and they never questioned it when I needed two logic board replacements and a new screen replaced under warranty.

The rule I follow with my Apple products, be it iPhones, iPods, or computers; is that if you mod the thing, just return it to the normal configuration when you need service. There is no way that a tech is going to be like “woah, woah. This thing had an SSD in it 2 weeks ago.” At the same time, be logical. If your SSD craps out do you think Apple will give a damn? (Yes, seems obvious, but you know people would try).

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This is totally awesome, I have known about this on PC laptops for a good minute, and have always done it.

But I never thought they would make em for Mac’s…

+100

SO cool.