Add a Second Hard Drive to Your MacBook, MacBook Pro

Professional video guys know one thing about storage in laptops: there’s never, ever enough. While desktops get set to support hard disk capacities of up to a terabyte, laptop drives top out at about 200 GB, one-fifth the capacity of a desktop. MCE Technologies, however, has come up with a way for MacBook and MacBook Pro users to push the envelope.

By removing the optical drive from your Mac portable, MCE’s OptiBay makes room for a secondary hard drive with capacities of up to 160 GB, for a theoretical maximum of 360 GB. Pricing starts at around $250, and includes the hard disk and an external enclosure for your displaced optical drive, so save for a little portability, you really lose nothing in the modification.

We’re not sure exactly what this would do for your Mac’s warranty, we’ll leave that up to you to research. But if you’re looking for a way to optimize your Mac’s storage, this is an interesting place to look.

OptiBay [Product Page]

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9 Comments so far

 
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Sascha (Who am I?)

Hm, the idea sounds new, but really isn’t. Dell and IBM/Lenovo have been offering hard-drives that fit into their respective optical drive bays for years, I actually used to own one and really liked it, since you usually don’t need your optical drive all the time and then just stick it in whenever you need it (yes, which means you are carrying it around all the time in your ginormous laptop bag which also holds that clunky adapter for 26 country power plugs, and your second and third replacement battery (in case one blows up))..

 
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vi (Who am I?)

I didn’t know that this was possible.

 
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Alex Becker (Who am I?)

I have 80 GB. It’s enough for me. If I need more I will get an external.

 
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Daan (Who am I?)

I’d like that with a 32GB SSD replacement of the original hard drive and a 32GB SSD replacement of the optical drive. Now add ZFS wih boot support and you’ll have one superfast Macbook :) I’ll take speed over gigabytes every time. Storage is external anyway.

 
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doonpiackr (Who am I?)

Thanks for this site!
hifue.info

 
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crlake (Who am I?)

80GB is enough!!! Whatever! 80 Gigs just cover my music files. What about my video files, Flash Animation, and art work? Anything less then 160GB is a joke.

 
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Jason (Who am I?)

That is a great tip.
Does any body looking for a case?
http://www.macbook-case.com

 
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samira-mp3 (Who am I?)

Good work!!!
Welcome dear friends on tne my blog with Samira!!!

 
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Blind-Virus (Who am I?)

Anything below a terrabyte sucks in my eyeys but what it has resulted in is that ive got a 350 gig in my macbook and on my server ive got 4 terabyts for my “storage” but can get it any where. music, games, work files ect.

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