Using an Optibay for new macbooks in warranty, should I?
Hey Macheads!
I’m near to buy my first macbook and after the article from yesterday:
Super Power Your Laptop with a SSD Double Swap! , that fits well for upgrade propouses, I kept myself thinking about what are the options for those buying new macbooks.
My option will be the cheaper 13’’ version with some modificated spec.
My main purpose is to have an SSD disk for the SO, DJ softwares/drivers and other heavily used software (browser, media player, etc).
I have two main questions:
With the Optibay mod I will loose my warranty? (this answer affects directly my other questions)
According to the white books, only the RAM and the HDD are user-replaceable.
However, there are no warranty void if broken stickers on the optical drive though, so i think you may just get away with it.
I called AppleCare because I couldn’t get a straight answer out of anyone else, and they said that it does void the warranty. But, the guy I talked to did not seem like a tech guy and had no idea what the thing was.
If you don’t use the drive in the Optibay as your boot drive, you shouldn’t have a problem at all. If for some reason you need to take your computer into the Apple store, just put the DVD drive back. It’ll boot up no problem for them and you won’t have anything to worry about.
The optibay mod doesn’t break any warranty seals or something like that?
I can “unmod” it easly if I need to send the macbook to fix something?
And another question: if I use a HDD 500gb 7200 rpm in the Optibay will I have any heating problem?
I mean, my bootable drive would be the SSD, and because of “warranty issues” it would stay on the HD place lefting the optibay place for the HDD…
Don’t know if this will help, but I’m about to buy all the stuff to do an optibay mod on my unibody 13".
I have the 250GB OEM HD. My plan is to pick up:
the same OCZ 240GB SSD as they used in the video (£345)
a 750GB Western Digital Scorpio Blue (5400rpm)(£71)
newmodeUS optibay equivalent caddy ($42, just ordered)
I’ll setup a snow leopard boot disk on a flash drive, then temporarily install the SSD on the optical side so I can clone the original drive. I’ll then swap the drives over, and install the 750GB HD in the optibay. (Can anyone see any problems with this method, or think of a better one??)
I’m also buying a slimline external optical drive for £25, and 8GB of RAM. My MBP should be pretty beastly after that
Since I’ll pack up and keep the original HD in its current condition and the superdrive, I’m not too worried about the applecare as I can always swap them back in.
P.S. I’m going for 5400rpm for battery life and heat reasons.
SSD in the original HDD slot, HDD in the optibay is the plan. It’ll take me a few weeks but yeh, I’ll probably post a thread on it once I get round to it!
Quick update for you guys, I’m in an apple store right now getting my battery replaced under warranty and the guy said it wouldn’t be a problem that I’d done the double swap, mainly because he wanted to have a look inside to see what I’d done!
I think it may depend on who helps you and what kind of mood they’re in, I might just have been lucky. Free battery replacement is awesome though, apparently I’ve managed 527 full charge cycles in just over 2 years and the battery was NOT happy.
Using an Optibay for new macbooks in warranty, should I?
So I’m doing this most likely, but is there a way to run both simultaneously so that my music and movies and whatnot can be on my HDD but my software and stuff an be on the SSD and they work simultaneously? Like it acts as one drive or I can just choose to install programs on whatever drive I want? I only want a 64 gb SSD for my programs and the rest can go on my HDD
Yep the SDD is the system drive and 2nd drive is storage. Can’t remember how i did this (was quite a while back) but i have a vague memory of using carbon copy cloner then altering where my home was?? There is a great how to online if you google it.
Worth noting that if your Mac goes to Apple for repair under Applecare the diagnostic they will run (which i have seen at first hand) will show that the optibay has been tampered with and your Apple care goes in the bin.
They had a look at mine last month and instanly knew id changed the HD (which was user replaceable) so no worries so you would have to undo any changes before taking it in.
My friend did the same thing, his keyboard letters where wearing off from heavy use so he took it in on his last week of AppleCare. Of course not realizing that he didn’t put his optical drive back in. He had a sticky note on his new keyboard when he got it back that said “sweet bay drive mod, gonna do this myself tech name scribbles”. You may meet a badass I think I’m gonna do it, too. Just got my GF’s old 1st gen Macbook back up and running, gonna throw a 1TB in an Optibay bracket and have it be my storage.
only thing ill say is that 60 (ish) Gb is not that big
i have osx and a buncha programs, and literally nothing else and im at like 54 gb used.
spend the extra money and make sure you have the space, as ive had to make sacrifices and not have certain programs run from my ssd (not sure if you can run em from the HDD tho… just thought of that, gonna check it out)
First, you can install programs wherever you want.
Second…you suck at space management. I ran off a 64GB SSD on my production/DJing laptop for like 3 years without a problem. I had very little free space, but I never got into issues from the drive being full and managed to keep a movie or two on the laptop at all times. Just don’t install any BS that you don’t need. If you try to install Komplete, for example, on an internal SSD…you deserve what you get.
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