Reddit reviews ZXUY Hard Drive SATA 2nd HDD Caddy Tray for Unibody 9.5mm Laptop CD/DVD-ROM Drive Slot (Replacement Only for SSD and HDD)

Now just put your old drive where that useless silver thing above it is.

http://www.amazon.com/Drive-Unibody-MacBook-SuperDrive-Replacement/dp/B0058AH2US/

Superdrive hard drive caddy: $9.70

120GB SSD: $60

USB Superdrive enclosure: $14

All in all, $84 to extend the life of your $2k laptop by a few more years. Well worth it in my opinion. Also if you're feeling adventurous, enable a fusion drive on your new dual-drive Mac.

BTW, the physical SSD and caddy option are very easy- just follow the take-apart guide on ifixit.com. It takes about one drink's worth of time to do.

Have fun!

As everyone else has said, yes.

Another note to add is that if you rarely or never use your optical drive, you can replace it with a 2nd hard drive! After I replaced my HDD with a 250GB SSD, I got one of these and replaced the optical drive with a 750GB HDD. My OS and apps live on the SSD, and my large music and photo libraries live on the HDD. I've found it to be the best option for me to keep plenty of onboard storage space while benefiting from the speed of the SSD. Grab an external enclosure for your optical drive if you still need to occasionally use it. I manually manage the 2 separate drives in my computer, but I've heard rumors that you can set them up in a way that the computer sees them both as a single apple "fusion" drive and manages them for you. I might go this route when I have some time to sit down and figure it out.

I replaced the 500GB HDD in my Mid 2012 MBP with an Intel SSD and I've been very happy with it. I can't remember which Intel SSD I have. Might be a 300 series, or a 500 series. Either way it is Intel, I know that.

You wont need any special mounting or brackets or anything, but it is a bit of a pain in the butt procedure. I miss the easy to access drives on some of the older MacBooks. You need to remove the bottom case, some cables, a daughterboard, and some other stuff. Lots of tiny awkward screws of varying sizes. Go slow, use a repair manual, and stay organized. I used to be a Mac Genius so here's a tip: get some large sticky labels, like shipping labels. Put them on the table sticky-side-up. Stick your screws to the label while you work in the right positions in relation to each other. That way you never forget where stuff goes, and nothing falls.

I also recommend getting a mounting bracket and putting your old spindle HDD in the optical drive slot. That's also a little bit of a process but so worth it because you can do a fusion drive, or just have 2 drives. Something like this:

http://www.amazon.com/Drive-Unibody-MacBook-SuperDrive-Replacement/dp/B0058AH2US/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1373150740&sr=8-1&keywords=macbook+pro+drive+caddy

I am very happy with 2 drives in mine.

I'm actually just about to purchase my 13" MBP this week. I'm ordering the SDD so that I can install it right as it arrives. I was thinking I would go with this 256GB Crucial M4 but I wanted to be sure it was a good choice. Also since I'm going to go with the i5 rather than the i7 I was going to upgrade the RAM to 16GB Corsair RAM. And I read this article on TRIM, but I'd be interested to hear what you have to say about it if you don't mind. Budget is $300 for the SSD, since I figure 256GB is enough with the 500GB HDD in the optibay.

EDIT: Oh! Also I'm going to need to pick this up for the HDD, correct?

Just for the sake of simplicity and being easy on the wallet I'd just upgrade your MBP. It might not be optimal having to switch back and forth with Bootcamp, but it's probably better than dropping $600 or so on a new laptop altogether.

Also, what model do you have? Is it a unibody with a disk drive or an Air/Retina? Because if it's the latter you can't upgrade the RAM on those since they're soldered into the board. However if it's a normal unibody with a disk drive not only can you upgrade the RAM, but on mine since I never used the DVD I bought an HDD caddy so I could bootcamp to my platter 500GB drive and run OSX on a 256GB SSD. Makes it a bit nicer working with two drives as well rather than messing with partitions. I then put the DVD drive into this external adapter so I could still use it for the rare occasion I needed to.

So by the time everything is said and done, you should be able to get those caddies, a 256GB SSD and 8GB of RAM for maybe $250. I think that's a much better deal than getting a whole new computer.

This is the fastest method.

It's also one of the safest methods and the easiest method. Plus, you get to verify that the new drive is working before putting it into your Mac. That's not really such big deal on a MBP 2011 since the drives are so easy to swap, but on other Macs making sure the drive is working properly can be a really good idea.

Also, you can get an external drive cable/adapter for like $13. This works great if you don't want an enclosure for the drive, but not advisable if you want a portable drive, in which case you want an enclosure.


Another option if the OP no longer wants the optical drive is to remove the optical drive and swap it with a HDD bracket and the old HDD drive. Then they can just clone from the old HDD drive internally to the new SSD.

You can also get an enclosure for the old optical drive making it a portable external optical drive.

Installing the SSD in the optical bay slot for your main drive will give you sleep/wake problems. Macs don't look for the main drive on that SATA port. Install the SSD in the default drive's location and put the HDD in the optical bay slot (which you'll be using for secondary storage).

For the Boot Camp installation, if you have enough space you can sacrifice on the SSD then go ahead and install Windows on it. It really depends on how often you'll be booting into Windows and if you want to reap the benefits of having it on the SSD. It's not necessary though, you can have OS X on the SSD and Windows on the HDD with no problems. Boot Camp takes care of partitioning whichever drive you chose during the installation process. I've done the exact same thing you're trying to do and chose to install Boot Camp/Windows on the HDD and never had any issues booting into Windows.

The installation process is straight forward, especially with so many tutorials online. I really recommend iFixit's tutorials if you're looking for any.

Also, check out this optical bay drive enclosure. It's waaaay cheaper than what iFixit or OWC sells them for, but I'm sure you could find a good deal on eBay as well.

I did to mine years ago. I bought this caddy from Amazon and replaced the Optical drive with my removed HDD (I had a 1TB normal HDD). Once I changed that out, I partitioned my SSD, 300GB to a Mac partition, and 200GB to a Windows Bootcamp partition, and then with the Optical Drive removed and now replaced with a 1TB HDD, I formatted that to exFAT so that both the Mac and Windows side could access and use it as a data drive. I did this years ago, and it is still running like a champ and have had zero issues. If you do not need/use your Optical Drive, I would highly suggest doing this as well. Plus, it's easy to switch back, if you end up not liking it.

Regardless of what desktop you end up getting, I recommend fixing your MBP to use when you're not at home. Especially for freelancing, it's super helpful to have a device to bring with you when pitching/presenting to clients.

I don't have any advice re: wireless card. But I've been trying to keep my 2012 MBP alive until the iMac Pro comes out, and probably the best upgrade I made was swapping the optical drive for a second hard drive using this adapter. You could install an SSD as your primary/boot drive and use your current mechanical hard drive as extra storage space, or set them up as a "Fusion drive" (I opted for the former).

Yeah, they all will.

I would recommend the following youtube videos if you need guidance on replacing/upgrading components here:

Battery

SSD & RAM

As far as I am aware, there is very little difference between the models, but use your common sense, don't pull on anything which is giving too much resistance and make sure everything is disconnected and reconnected properly.

How set are you on your 1TB sshd? it could be worth looking into the SSD & HDD combo, replacing the disk drive with the HDD using a special bracket

EDIT: Formatting

No I don't think they are lying but placing an SSD in the optical bay is useless because you won't get the speed benefit without a SATA III connection.

If you do install an SSD, it should be in the regular hard drive bay. You can get a caddy for the stock hard drive for pretty cheap. I used this one: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0058AH2US?psc=1&redirect=true&ref_=oh_aui_detailpage_o05_s00

I would stick with 10.6.8 for now. If/when you do add the SSD, you'll notice how dramatic of a speed increase it is, and then you can make the decision of whether or not you should upgrade.

I did a similar swap a few months ago, I had no problems, and bought the following products:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0058AH2US
and optionally, this: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B002IRY3ME

The second link simply provides you a way to still use your CD drive, in case of emergency. I haven't used it yet, but for 8 bucks, I figured why not?

I put my SSD in the original boot slot, and put my HDD into the caddy, but idk if this will matter. SMART status is verified on both.

You should install a fresh copy of OS X onto the SSD, if you have Lion, this can be done through via the "Recovery Partition," or through a USB drive.

You will probably need a phillips #00, and #000, and a Torx (can't remember what size, I think a 5 or 6) for the mounts on the hard drive. Ask me any other questions you have.

Immediately install TRIM enabler once you're all set up.

http://www.groths.org/?tag=trim-enabler

I got this bracket and it seems to be working fine. There was a small screwdriver included. Removing the connections was a bit more tricky since it wasn't always clear whether they lift off straight or slide off. A small magnet was useful to stop screws from dropping into the machine. It wasn't that difficult but was more complicated that a drive swap.

No problem! I got this one - the 240GB variant. Any smaller and it would've been too much work to keep junk off of it in the long run, and I didn't want to pay more than that at the time, or I would've gone bigger. The 240 was the right price for me at the time.

I also got this hard drive caddy that goes into the optical bay so I could move my stock hard drive to where my DVD drive was.

Then I symlinked some of the larger folders in my User folder to folders on that second drive. This article from Matt Gemmell helped me figure that part out.

Then for good measure I put it on a Rain Design mStand and got a detached keyboard, mouse, and a powered USB hub to make it easy to disconnect it and run out the door.

I think it might be the caddy, too. It should've worked because I've done it on my 2011 (sata 2 in optibay) and several 2012s (sata 3 in optibay). Can you link the optibay you got? For reference, I've used this one here on 2011+2012 units with no issues.

You're using the original cable to connect the optibay to the logic board, correct? Just wondering in case the optibay mfg threw in their own cable.

I can provide some help on your second query. I have a 2011 15' MBP and had replaced my optical drive with the HDD that came with the Mac. There are a couple of things to consider.

Firstly, the optical drive (I think they call it SuperDrive) can be put in a USB enclosure and used after taking it out.

Secondly, the SATA on my optical drive bay is 3Gb/s, not 6. so I can't take full advantage of SSD speeds. Hence my decision to use a regular HDD instead. YMMV though.

And lastly, I got my HDD bracket (the thing that fits on the optical drive bay, and carries your HDD) from Amazon for about $10. The more popular, but expensive, solution would be the OptiBay. That will run you $30. From my own experience, I haven't run into any problem using the one I have [1].

Replacing the optical drive was one of the best things I've done with my mac. I have the blazing fast SSD for the OS and programs, and the 750GB HDD for my media files and backups. I highly recommend it!


[1] - http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0058AH2US/ref=oh_aui_detailpage_o04_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1

Edit: Gb/s, not Ghz.

No idea why the OWC one is so expensive.

I've used this one for a while now and it's worked flawlessly.

I was pretty nervous too about the upgrade, but just take your time watch a bunch of youtube how-to's and I would suggest taking a look at this walk through: https://www.ifixit.com/Guide/MacBook+Pro+15-Inch+Unibody+Early+2011+Hard+Drive+Replacement/5895

Things you'll need that aren't on that page are one of these, SATA III Hard Drive Adapter Cable

the tools I bought this one. Comes in a nice case and has everything you need

the hard drive. I already linked to the one I chose, but there are other options

and if you want to keep the old drive as a back up, you'll need one of these

I got my ram a while back so I don't have a direct link, but make sure you're getting the kind that will work with her machine. There are plenty of online guides and the question has been asked/answered here more than a couple times, but if you get overwhelmed just throw up another post. People here are generally great.

Not really endorsing any of these things over the competition, just trying to be helpful. Good luck. It's an AMAZING improvement once it's done!

I have a mid-2010 15" MacBook Pro and have done a few upgrades to it recently that have really helped. The options you have available are: upgrading your RAM, swapping out your hard drive, and removing the DVD drive and replacing it with a hard drive caddy and a second hard drive. RAM will increase performance somewhat and allow you to run more things at once with more fluidity. Swapping out your hard drive will give you more storage space and/or faster read/write times, depending on if you put your money towards storage space or an SSD. The hard drive caddy option is a more intense modification, (though in truth it isn't a hard procedure at all), but it gives you the best of both worlds: you can buy an SSD as your boot drive, and still have tons of storage space on the other hard drive. It's a great mod if you don't frequently use your DVD drive, and for about $30, you can buy a USB enclosure to keep using said drive.

If I had to make one change, regardless of price, I would put an SSD in the computer. It will be by far the biggest performance boost.

But depending on your budget, here are the upgrades I would make:

Smallest: Upgrade to 8GB RAM, $60 or so. This G.Skill RAM is a good place to start. Protip: "Mac Memory" is just a sales tactic to mark up prices. As long as you find RAM to the specifications you're looking for, it will work. Just do a bit of research and make sure other MacBook Pro users have used the RAM successfully.

Larger: Upgrade RAM and purchase an SSD, perhaps something like the Samsung 840 250GB. $150-300

Larger still: Upgrade the RAM, purchase an SSD, and buy an optical drive bay caddy to hold your previous hard drive as a data drive. $250-350 if you also buy an enclosure to use the optical drive via USB.

Largest: Upgrade RAM, purchase an SSD, purchase a new HDD such as the 750GB 7200rpm WD drive listed in another comment, and buy a drive bay caddy to hold the new HDD data drive. $325-425.

That is a lot of money for a optical drive D: I don't have much experience with ebay but I know that ifixit has multiple guides on youtube and their website. An alternative would be buying a data doubler and maybe buying a hard-drive to put in. At least then you would have functionality back instead of a broken optical drive. Then maybe buying an external disk drive? This is the route that most people do with their Macbook Pro's, but instead of a hard-drive, they use SSD's. 10$ for the data doubler and maybe 50$ for a external disk-drive?

Woah buddy.

Or you could spend:
$11.08 + $174.99

... Just saved you $100.

Someone posted something like this yesterday, I thought it was interesting so I looked around on Amozon forthe best hard drive caddy:http://www.amazon.com/Drive-Unibody-MacBook-SuperDrive-Replacement/dp/B0058AH2US/ref=cm_cr_pr_product_top

You can do everything with a SSD in a caddy that you could with your main (including booting from the drive). Just don't expect any performance boosts since most DVD drives are 1.5 GB/s, whist most sata connections are 3 GP/s. So an SSD will not be that much faster than a normal HDD.

Here's the one I bought on amazon

http://www.amazon.com/Drive-Unibody-MacBook-SuperDrive-Replacement/dp/B0058AH2US/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1344003218&sr=8-1&keywords=macbook+pro+optical+drive+hard+drive

I think any of them will work just fine. I haven't installed mine yet, but people on amazon give it good reviews.

Upgrading your hdd and ram in a macbook pro is super easy to do yourself. $150 got me a 128gb ssd and 8gb of ram vs apple trying to charge me $500 for that.

Also, I just found out about this: http://www.amazon.com/Drive-Unibody-MacBook-SuperDrive-Replacement/dp/tech-data/B0058AH2US/ref=de_a_smtd

So I'll be putting my "old" 500gb hdd in there.

I'm not sure if you're interested, but you might consider an enclosure like this rather than an external drive.

https://www.amazon.ca/Drive-Unibody-MacBook-SuperDrive-Replacement/dp/B0058AH2US

I know some people actually use their optical drives, but I have had an external optical drive since I bought a MacBook Air in 2011 and I've used it less than a dozen times.

As for the SSDs you listed - for all the work you are going to do, I'd definitely go with the 120GB unit. SanDisk is a reasonably good company for entry-level SSDs. As for how Mac-compatible it is, I'll have to leave answering that to someone else.

Even better, put an SSD drive in AND a disk drive in place of the cd drive with one of these caddies: https://www.amazon.com/ZXUY-Unibody-Laptop-DVD-ROM-Replacement/dp/B0058AH2US

Speed and extra space!

ZXUY Hard Drive SATA 2nd HDD Caddy Tray for Unibody 9.5mm Laptop CD/DVD-ROM Drive Slot (Replacement Only for SSD and HDD) https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0058AH2US/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_apap_C1RaI8GLyjBPM

Samsung 750 EVO - 500GB - 2.5-Inch SATA III Internal SSD (MZ-750500BW) https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01G844L88/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_apap_EEZETiobgw5lt

This is the mount for the HDD (i have the OS running from SSD, and moved the HDD to where the disk drive was.
It's very simple to do, you may want to do some googling if you aren't familiar with/ Disk Utility.

I have a Samsung as well. It's a 480GB SSD. Then I took my optical drive out and put my original HHD in its place. I use Carbon Copy Cloned to keep an external duplicate of my system in case my SSD crashes or looses power in bad timing. It's saved me a few time when I delete a file on accident. Most importantly, no matter what SSD you get, remember to enable TRIM.

How to enable TRIM
MBP SATA Bay

I've had this optibay HDD caddy in my computer since August 2012 and it has worked flawlessly. Initially, I had a 128GB SSD as a boot drive and a 750GB spinning HDD in the optibay. They worked well together. I used the 750GB HDD to store my Home folder location so I could keep all of my music on my machine. When the drive failed, however, my set-up was fucked and it took nearly a day to get everything restored from back-ups. So, from experience (and some headaches), I would suggest getting a larger sized SSD (500GB?) and put the 320GB HDD in the optibay for 'storage purposes'. But don't rely on it to store all of your data in case it does eventually fail.

If i'm not mistaken- this site provides the specs for your computer. You should upgrade the RAM as well. Your comp will support up to 16GB.

I replaced my battery via eBay. I paid around $80 for a new one for my 15" MBP. Your 13" should be cheaper. A quick search gave these options.

Happy hunting!

TL;DR: get any larger sized SSD you can find for cheap (Samsung, Crucial, Sandisk are good options). Upgrade your RAM. Get a new battery.

Yes, current drive into optical bay. The SSD should be where your current drive is now since that bay provides more bandwidth which is necessary for the SSD to function at its max potential.

You need a caddy to place a 2.5" hard drive into the optical bay. This is what I use: http://www.amazon.com/Drive-Unibody-MacBook-SuperDrive-Replacement/dp/B0058AH2US

Any SSD will be a great boot drive. Crucial or Samsung drives are solid. Get 256GB or up to whatever you can reasonably afford. I use a 256GB Samsung 840 Pro as a boot drive and my original 500GB mechanical drive for general storage. Hybrid drives (blend of SSD and mechanical technology) like the one you listed aren't so great since they compromise too much IMO.

For you to stay under budget, get a Samsung 850 EVO 512GB SSD, 16GB RAM and put your current drive into the caddy and then into the optical bay.

Don't pay for the owc data doubler or mce optibay, the cheap amazon/ebay versions are identical and work fine for me

Correct. I just bought an SSD and one of these which screws into the superdrive spot. Super easy to install just make sure you use the right size screwdriver! I stripped on of the screws because I was impatient.

I have this same machine with 16gb of ram. It's pretty damn fast. I think it's a good choice.

I also added an SSD later. One thing you might consider is setting up a small SSD (I got a 64gb SSD for $40) as your boot drive and moving your HDD to the optical drive bay using one of these.

http://www.amazon.com/Drive-Unibody-MacBook-SuperDrive-Replacement/dp/B0058AH2US/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1370287014&sr=8-1&keywords=ssd+caddy+macbook+pro

That way you can buy a cheap small SSD and get the benefit of the SSD speed for booting and launching apps, but keep your large HDD for file storage. The SSD+Optical Bay Caddy upgrade was the best ~$50 upgrade I've ever done.

Definitely go the upgrade route. Trust me, it is worth it. Boot time is around 15 seconds now. Things load instantly. It is like I have a new machine.

You can actually use both. Get something like this and you can replace the dvd drive with your old HDD. Or, some SSD's come with a USB to SATA plug. You plug your HDD into the adapter and plug the USB into the port and you now have an external drive. I use my old HDD as my Time Machine backup disk now.

I would just reccomend taking out the DVD drive and using this adapter to put a second drive in. Also get an SSD and use the 750GB hard drive as storage. I personally have an Mid 09 MBP with a 120GB SSD and a 700GB HD as my DVD drive.

Hey congrats! Welcome to the cult community.

Get 8 GB of RAM, more if you're planning on running VMs. Here's your caddy!

For software, start with the MacPorts package manager. People will tell you to use the collection of git scripts that is Homebrew, but MacPorts is a true package manager with a repository on part with that of, say, Debian's.

Let us know how you like it!

If you mean like an update for the Nexus 7, which was a week out of warranty iPhone, but instead replace it with a HDD bracket and the old HDD drive. Except they don't allow you to change the way the plus downscales.

I did this myself on my 2012 15" MBP.

I put the SSD in the hard drive bay because the HDD bay supports SATA III 6Gb/s while the Optical bay is only SATA II 3GB/s. I then installed the 500GB HDD in to this: http://amzn.com/B0058AH2US and then installed it in the optical bay.

After that I tried to boot OSX from the HDD but I couldn't get it to work. I eventually said fsck it and did a clean install to the SSD. Been working fantastically since.

What I did when I upgraded to a SSD was replace my optical drive with the stock hard drive using this. I have most of my home folder symlinked to the second hard drive, with all of my applications and the OS on the SSD. I also bought this external enclosure for the optical drive, so I can still use it if I ever need to.

This is the one I bought, http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0058AH2US

While they don't come with instructions the ifixit teardown guide has a step by step guide on how to remove the old superdrive.

This is almost exactly what I'm running and it works like a charm. One suggestion: Get an $8 caddy and replace the optical drive with a 2nd hard drive... you can get a 1TB SS hybrid drive for insanely cheap, which is not as fast as a full SSD, but unless you're dealing with a project requiring tons and tons of processing it's fast enough to work off of without having to freeze anything.

I replaced the optical drive with this caddy... works great, the only hard part about the installation was dealing with those stupid screws that Apple uses inside the machine.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0058AH2US?psc=1&redirect=true&ref_=od_aui_detailpages00

Well, there is a website called www.fixit.com that has walkthroughs and tutorials that can help for almost anything you would want to do.

I got this RAM.

>Pretty easy to install, just follow this guide.

I got this SSD.
>You can replace the old drive you have in your computer with this guide, or you can double your data (see below).

I got this CD drive caddy.

>You can follow this guild to swap out your optical drive with an SSD, so you have two hard drives in your computer.

Then you just install Yosemite on the SSD, and boot into that, use migration assistant to copy your stuff from the first drive. Then you use disk utility to wipe/erase the old drive and boom: you have storage and you have a fast booting SSD without that much more cost. If you can spend more than that, just get a bigger capacity SSD and maybe a new hard drive as well. Or just get 1 SSD and saw the hard drive.

I say, why have one drive when you can have two.

Cool, would this hard drive enclosure work for swapping the HDD to the optical bay? Also, would I lose speed on the HDD? I'll still be keeping things like music files and what not on it.

I just did this today. SuperDrive is now in an external case, 1TB HDD is in the optical bay. I did not use the OWC kit, as it was way more expensive.

Here's what I used:

For the external drive:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B005RFOJT6/ref=oh_aui_detailpage_o09_s01?ie=UTF8&psc=1

For the optical bay:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0058AH2US/ref=oh_aui_detailpage_o09_s02?ie=UTF8&psc=1

All for less than $25. OWC is $29 for just the optical bay caddy. Both worked like a charm.

Thanks!

when you say optibay frame, that's the same as the optibay caddy right?

I was going to get this: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0058AH2US/ref=ox_sc_act_title_5?smid=A3Q4G302TLNJTB&psc=1

Some options:

• Samsung 500gb SSD - https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00OBRE5UE
  
• Samsung 250gb SSD - https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00OAJ412U
  
• Corsair 8gb ram - https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B005JRH9V2
  
• Harddrive SATA tray - https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0058AH2US
  
  The tray is great if you want to take the existing HD on the laptop and put it in the slot where the CD drive on the laptop is.
  
  ​
  
  https://www.ifixit.com/Device/MacBook_Pro_13%22_Unibody_Early_2011
  
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wPmElFhf_Es

I'm going to chime in with a completely different answer to your question, but a path that I took may be similar to what you need.

I'm a physics student and I use my combination for programming, taking notes, and a bunch of other things.

I bought my laptop, a Lenovo G500 for $330 from Staples during a massive sale that they had. I also put a big coupon on top of it, which is why I got such a good deal. I wanted a computer with an SSD, so I bought this adapter and took out my CD drive. I don't miss the CD drive at all, and I love having an SSD in my laptop. Mind you, I don't do any really hardcore gaming, so I don't worry about my lack of a graphics card. I can play Titanfall on it, though. All told, I'm in about $450 or less on my laptop.

I also bought an Asus Transformer Book. This one I got on sale from the Microsoft Store for about $350 (and they gave me an extra 10% off because I'm a student). I bought a stylus with this, too. I'm planning on acquiring a big microSD when I need more space, but I'm not really close to filling it yet, since I really only use it for productivity purposes.

It's not all wrapped up into one device, but I've got a good laptop and a laptop/tablet hybrid that enables me to take notes of everything I need (including on the fly equations) with relative ease. I've been a google fanboy for years, but transitioning to a Windows tablet was the right decision for me, because I plug this thing into all sorts of physics equipment that only has Windows drivers and software. I suppose I could go fancy and install a Linux OS on the tablet, but I don't really need it on there and that would definitely mess with my storage space.

This option works brilliantly for me, but it may be completely wrong for you. I'm just saying you want to keep your options open and look for deals. I got into my setup for about $800.

One other thing; get a touchscreen if you can. Windows 8.1 works very well with a touchscreen and you may find yourself liking the Metro interface if you have that option. I have it on my tablet, but not on my laptop and I wish I had it on both.

(Here's a link to the product,)[http://www.amazon.com/Drive-Unibody-MacBook-SuperDrive-Replacement/dp/B0058AH2US/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1425582441&sr=8-3&keywords=macbook+pro+cd+adapter] , super easy to install.

I recently added an SSD & moved my HDD to the expansion bay. I am very pleased with my decision. As others have said, it feels like a new machine.

You can also probably upgrade for cheaper than the ifixit estimate:

• $80 for 240-56 GB SSD via slickdeals hunting, like here [I replaced my original HDD with this, since that SATA port should give faster read/write speeds]
  
• $10 for this bay
  
• $10 to repurpose the superdrive
  
• $70 for 2x4GB RAM on Newegg I think this is compatible, but be sure to double-check.
  
• Battery from ebay/amazon - I would guess around $60.
  
  Total: $170 [$230+ after battery]

ca_va_bien pretty much said it. You remove the disc drive and put in a second HDD/SSD. Because the disc drive and an SSD/HDD have different sizes you'll need something like this: http://www.amazon.com/Drive-Unibody-MacBook-SuperDrive-Replacement/dp/B0058AH2US/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1426678329&sr=8-1&keywords=macbook+drive+caddy

It doesn't really matter which HDD/SSD is in which position, but it is recommended to have the system on one drive (SSD if you have one) and the data on the other one.

Also you should know that the caddy only allows a certain height of the drive. Among the 2TB HDD there are only a very few, which are of a normal/smaller height. You will want to make sure that you get one of those obviously.

There are lots of articles about replacing the optical drive with a HDD/SSD by using a special drive carrier like this one which is the original AFAIK or this one which I used to save money. You get what you pay for, and the fit was a little tricky with the less expensive one, but it worked. This link goes to some videos for the actual physical install.

I installed OS X from scratch and then used Apple's Migration Assistant to migrate my data from the old HDD to the new SSD. Smooth as silk. As for placement of the boot drive messing with the sleep function - WHAT?! That makes no sense to me and is certainly not my experience. I had read that the Sudden Motion Sensor used by the Mac to park your HDD if you drop the machine might not park a drive in the optical bay. That makes some sense to me so I put the drive with no moving parts there. It's been 2 and a half months and no issues at all.

As for web page speed - that's just an example of how the speed of everything this Mac does is improved. Yes, the big difference is a result of faster cache read/writes on the SSD. More RAM means less cacheing to begin with, so also greater speed. This is just one example, though. Google Earth has gone from a little bit slow to OMFG that's FAST! Not just with the image rendering, but just loading the app is ridiculously faster.

Coming back to your question about the scripts. I went to a friend for this. My buddy is a Unix Guru and I - well, I'm not. Because of that I will not place the scripts here. If I get something wrong in the translation, I don't want to cause you heartache. The short version is that by using diskutil (the CLI back end of Disk Utility) my buddy determined which logical volume needed to be unmounted/mounted. He then wrote the commands as a shell script to execute the action and exit Terminal. All of this is easily researched online or through the diskutil man pages, but I went to my pal because he makes my life easy.

What do you exactly mean by speeding up? Overall performance, or something else?

For performance, get a solid state drive (SSD). It will reduce boot time to mere seconds, and make your applications run smooth / open quickly.

I upgraded my 17 inch late 2010 MacBook Pro with a Samsung 840 Pro 256 GB SSD and I replaced my superdrive with a HDD caddy and a 1TB 2.5" drive. Boots faster than the macbook air we have, and has a crapton of space. Hope this helps

Technically, if you find a laptop with a disk drive, you could replace it with [this converter](ZXUY Hard Drive SATA 2nd HDD Caddy Tray for Unibody 9.5mm Universal Laptop CD/DVD-ROM Drive Slot (Replacement Only for SSD and HDD) https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0058AH2US/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_apa_PVMlyb3PS7M25) and you can then have two hard drives. It might make it easier to find something cheaper cause most laptops with two that I can think of are performance machines

Can I ask why you need this? I agree that's it's super useful to have multiple, but wouldn't it be easier to get a cheap desktop that could fit a bunch of drives?

Sure there are a bunch on Amazon and I don't remember which one I chose. Here's a link to one of them:

ZXUY Hard Drive SATA 2nd HDD Caddy Tray for Unibody 9.5mm Universal Laptop CD/DVD-ROM Drive Slot (Replacement Only for SSD and HDD) https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0058AH2US/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_POUmyb6QB9Q9B

What was going on at work? Just busy with random stuff, or was it anything particularly notable?

I'm doing reasonably well. Things are alright, it's definitely the calm before the storm. We still haven't found anyone to take over the lease, but I decided that if we don't have someone to take over the apartment lease by the 15th, I'm going to break it (which costs a lot, but I'm so ready to be done with this situation). Since then, she's definitely cleaned and helped a ton.

-------

A flat surface is great, but just as important is that it's a good work surface. I mentioned carpet because touching it can generate static electricity. If you accidentally shock computer components it can cause a lot of damage. In order to combat that, touch the metal case of your macbook pro before you touch any of the internal components. That should ground you, and prevent that from happening.

First of all, if you want to replace your optical drive with your HDD, you need an adaptor. Here's an example that would work for you. What you want to do is back up your HDD, take it out, and replace it with your SSD. Then, you want to take out the optical drive and replace that with the adaptor/HDD assembly. Then, you go install the mac os from scratch on your SSD (you can basically just put the mac os install files on a flash drive, and then boot from that and install it), and then restore your data. After that, you can go ahead and wipe the HDD, so you have just one operating system installed on your computer.

After you're done with all that, instead of having one drive that you can save stuff on, you get two. You can use that in a couple of ways - you could set up the HDD as a backup drive, so you have a bit of redundancy for your data. Given that you still have a reasonable amount of space left over, that might be a good approach. Alternatively, if you do wind up with a lot of data, you can use the HDD as a "random storage" drive, and leave your SSD as your operating system drive. That's how I usually configure my computers.

Between upgrading the RAM, adding a SSD, replacing the dvd drive with your HDD, reinstalling your OS, and restoring your data, I'd say you're looking at maybe 6 hours in total? That's just an estimate, as I don't know how long the mac os takes to install.

Sarah's not sleeping around in an attempt to provoke me - she's actually been pretty open about it. But honestly, I just don't really care. In a lot of ways, things only mean what they do because people agree on it; by refusing to give sex any greater meaning, I remove so many arbitrary social rules and expectations from my life. In my mind, that's a good thing - cutting away complexity with Occam's Razor is surprisingly cathartic.

Puppy's shedding schedule has been a bit weird. While I was trying to switch her to rats, she wasn't eating enough to grow much. When we first started talking, I'd just been able to get her eating again, and she shed for the first time in a couple months. Since then, she's been eating pretty well, and so she grew a decent amount pretty quickly. Snakes shed pretty fast (maybe once every month or two) when they are young, and it slows down as they age. Leche (or should I call her Starlady?) is going to look downright fabulous when she sheds!

----------

Honestly, what I'd say is check out Adobe's Creative Cloud Photography plan. It's $10/mo, and gives you Lightroom and Photoshop. With those two, you should be able to edit existing photos very effectively. And once you have cleared your backlog, you can suspend your membership for a while.

Honestly, I've never really been much of a car person. It's kind of a pity - I'd like to be a car person, but I've never had an opportunity to learn. Those are some great photos! I really like them. :)

------

So, my best friend is an ENTP, too. He's just like you - doesn't want kids at all. I'm kinda curious about whether being anti-kid is a common thread among us xNTP types.

Yeah, I totally get what you mean. You already know and understand the meaning, even if you haven't put it into words. A surprising number of people have told me that they have to think in words - they can't think of concepts if they don't know the words. Other people have told me that they think visually - when thinking of a tree for example, they actually have to picture a tree.

I think that staying in an unhealthy situation, even if you have good intentions, can often end up being worse for everyone involved. Before you can heal, you need to stop further damage from happening. I think that 'staying together for the kids' falls into that category. If I were growing up and understood that my parents were continuing to be miserable for my sake, it'd certainly make me feel shitty about it. But, like you, my opinion doesn't count for much, heh.

---------

Let me know when you're getting started with coding - I know enough to help you out with any of the stuff you're likely to encounter while learning. :)

Typically, what people actually do is have two servers - a development server, and a live server. They tell google to ignore the dev server (making it more or less private), and perfect it there. Then, after everything is all set up, they "launch" the site on the live server.

I saw an AMA on /r/science a while back that talked about this exact thing. I saved it, and will be rereading it when I'm starting to get my shit together to start on that path.

--------

Definitely add some fake plants! A splash of green would look great in there.

edit: oh my fucking god. I don't know how familiar you are with american politics, but this is a fucking disaster.

As big as you can afford ideally. It depends on if you're installing games to it or if you have large media files - video editing etc. How much space have you used on your current disk and what are your needs? That'll give you an idea.

Personally I would go at least 250GB. The Samsung 850EVOs are excellent and well worth the money. For additional storage space you could use an external HDD or get a DVD adapter caddy. Some of these only support 500GB HDDs however.

I did this on my Macbook 5.1 a year or so ago. Glorious easy install of the battery and disk drive. The hardware has been all downhill since then. =(

I backed up to external USB time machine, took out the old drive, installed the new one, did a fresh install of OSX on the new drive, and restored via Time Machine once the new OS was working.

Keep your old drive untouched for a week or two in case you need it. After that, you can wipe it or something.

If you don't use your DVD drive often, you might stick your old disk drive in there to use as more local storage:

http://www.amazon.com/Drive-Unibody-MacBook-SuperDrive-Replacement/dp/B0058AH2US/

And then stick your old DVD drive into a USB chassis, like this:

http://www.amazon.com/Super-Slim-SATA-External-Burner/dp/B005RFOJT6/

This is what I bought. http://www.amazon.com/Drive-Unibody-MacBook-SuperDrive-Replacement/dp/B0058AH2US/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1334021667&sr=8-1

You would have to shop around to make sure you get the correct one..but you should get an optical bay HDD caddy so you can have a large rotational HDD and a fast SDD in the same computer.

Like this:
http://www.amazon.com/Drive-Unibody-MacBook-SuperDrive-Replacement/dp/B0058AH2US/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1342501574&sr=8-2

I'm a personal fan of backing up your windows partition then doing a fresh install on the new drive, but there's plenty of cloning software options so I'll leave that up to you. As for the caddy, I use this one and it works like a charm in my 13" 2011 MBP. Make sure to install the SSD in your original HDD location, as the SuperDrive slot has a slightly slower R/W speed.

If it has a dvd drive you can remove it and put one of these in it's place to hold the hdd.

https://smile.amazon.com/ZXUY-Unibody-Laptop-DVD-ROM-Replacement/dp/B0058AH2US/

16GB is probably overkill for me, but I'm glad your memory bump helped! Are you going to try to set it up as a Fusion Drive? This macsales.com guide seems pretty good, and people in the comments have had some success with it. Mind commenting later to see how your performance changes when you add the SSD (whether or not you run it as a fusion drive)?

I've heard good things about OWC, but I'm probably going to end up saving $20 and go with this tray from amazon haha

Here is an example of the ODD adapter.

And here is an example of a USB enclosure for the ODD.

Heres what I would do: get the 2.6Ghz model with 4GB of ram and the 500GB or maybe 750 (if you have lots of things youll need to store)rotating hard drive:

Upgrade the ram from a third party: you can get 16GB for around 150 bucks, or 12GB for around 120. This added memory will really help with video editing

A 120 GB SSD is only around 100 bucks on amazon.

Upgrade the memory with what you purchased from the internet, not apple.

Replace the hard drive that comes with the computer with an SSD. Then, remove your optical drive, and use something like this to hold the old rotating drive. Install your applications, operating system on this drive, and large data such as your music library on the larger, slower drive. If you have a lot of applications or games I would go for the 250GB drive.

So in total thats:

120-150 for RAM
100-170 for SSD
~10 for optical drive replacement holder

12 GB ram and a 256GB SSD is a much better use of your money than a .1GHZ processor upgrade

I have used this for the same model and it worked well. It appears that it's just rebranded, so I would assume it would work just fine.

The Data Doubler is the name OWC gave to its product to allow you to put a hard drive or ssd into the optical bay. It is just a piece of plastic that holds the drive in place.

It is not optimal for a spinning hard drive to be in the data doubler chassis, as it is not really designed to keep the spinning drive stable. It is really meant for SSDs.

http://www.amazon.com/OWC-Doubler-Optical-Mounting-Solution/dp/B00724W0N2/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1457537224&sr=8-2&keywords=data+doubler

You can find cheaper versions of this around amazon and ebay, and even get an external enclosure for your optical drive, turning it into a USB super drive, but the OWC version has the best ratings.

If you are going to do only 1 SSD, put it in the data doubler. If you are going to do two SSDs, then put an SSD in both places, and possibly even RAID them together so that you get a single drive with increased performance, BUT MAKE SURE TO BACK UP YOUR DATA!

Let me know if you have more questions.

Edit: This is the one I bought: http://www.amazon.com/Drive-Unibody-MacBook-SuperDrive-Replacement/dp/B0058AH2US/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1457537224&sr=8-3&keywords=data+doubler It is better for holding the spinning standard HDD since it is a bit stronger than plastic, and holds the drive in with four screws.

Good thing I'm not in the service business - sorry for the slow response:

http://www.amazon.com/Seagate-Mobile-2-5-Inch-Internal-ST2000LM003/dp/B00MPWYLHO/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1459176471&sr=8-2&keywords=2TB+seagate+laptop+drive

http://www.amazon.com/Drive-Unibody-MacBook-SuperDrive-Replacement/dp/B0058AH2US/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1459176429&sr=8-1&keywords=macbook+pro+drive+caddy

It probably takes 10 minutes (and you need a Torx screwdriver on top of the one needed to get the bottom case off) - but it's totally worth it.

I use a 256GB SSD (bought when it was like $300, sadly - now you could get a 1TB for the same or less) and the above linked 2TB drive for media.

If you were really crazy though, you could get 2 x 1TB SSDs and RAID them together for super performance. Not really necessary...

You can definitely add an HDD to your mac and use it for storage. If it's a desktop mac, adding the HDD should be fairly straightforward - mount the drive in the case, connect it to the motherboard with a SATA cable (you'll probably need to find/buy one of these), and provide it with power (the Mac should provide a connector).

If it's a macbook, things get a bit trickier. If it has an optical (DVD/CD) drive, you can remove it and install a hard drive in a caddy like this. If it doesn't have an optical drive, your only real options are to replace the whole drive with a bigger one, or extend your storage with a portable hard drive.

If you don't used your dvd drive, get a hard drive tray caddy so you can use your current hdd to hold your music/videos/etc. Check for compatibility, but here is a search starting place: http://www.amazon.com/Drive-Unibody-MacBook-SuperDrive-Replacement/dp/B0058AH2US/

If you are planning to replace the HDD with a SSD maybe next thing is a nice option :
http://www.amazon.com/Drive-Unibody-MacBook-SuperDrive-Replacement/dp/B0058AH2US

So you can put the hybrid HD in place of the superdrive (which most people hardly use). That way you have cheap extra storage.

I don't have experience with replacing it. Maybe others know how difficult this will be.

Awesome—thanks! Regarding the sudden motion detection, since I already replaced my HDD with an SSD, would you recommend putting the SSD (boot drive) in where the optical/CD drive is right now, and then moving the new HDD back to the original drive-that-came-with-the-Mac location (so, where the SSD is now – so aka switch the two)? (Haha, let me know if that was hard to understand.) Edit: Based on this video, apparently the optical bay has to have an HDD in it—SSD won't work/won't let you partition it. In the comments someone said an SSD works in there with a 2012 Mac, but didn't work with the video uploader's 2011 Mac. Since mine's mid-2010, I'm assuming it won't work—since it's older than 2011 in which that also doesn't work.

From what I've read and making assumptions based on that, did you mean a 9.5mm height drive, as opposed to 9mm?

That's smart to use symlinks... I'll be sure to do that! Thanks for the suggestion of the WD Blue. Do you know how it runs compared to the WD Black or Green?

Finally, does the type of caddy/tray matter? The one that fits in the optical bay with the hard drive in place of the CD drive, that is. Someone else recommended this one... looks fine, I think? Thank you so much!

This is the one I got: Hard Drive Caddy Tray for Apple Unibody MacBook / MacBook Pro 13 15 17 SuperDrive (Replacement Only) https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0058AH2US/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_awd_l4LjxbDRVAEDS

Here you go. $5.00!
http://www.amazon.com/Drive-Unibody-MacBook-SuperDrive-Replacement/dp/B0058AH2US/ref=sr_1_8?ie=UTF8&qid=1462132234&sr=8-8&keywords=mac+cd+drive+adapter

I'm actually getting ready to do this myself in a week or so. I have a Crucial M4 128gb. I picked up an optibay-type cage for the old HDD so I can keep it in the system, and an external enclosure for the superdrive when i've taken it out.

My gameplan is to pull the HDD, set it aside, and do a fresh install of Lion onto the SSD from a SD card (I'll push the Lion DMG onto the card before I get into the guts of the machine), then physically reinstall the HDD to the old optical bay. I'll copy what programs & settings I need from that drive, then delete everything I don't want to save that's still on it (i.e., leave my documents & music alone) and then fix the permissions by hand.

This one should work, though I haven't tried it. It looks like the regular 5.25 slim form factor that I used in a slim PC case.

• Get the new battery from an Apple store or third party service provider or find a genuine one on sale somewhere (I wouldn't trust third party batteries)
  
• The RAM you will need for your model is here. Your computer does support 16GB, but the sticks seem kind of hard to come by.
  
• I recommend getting an SSD and maybe a secondary hard drive to replace your optical drive. (Use a hard drive caddy like this)
  
• Your GPU and processor are a part of your logic board (Not easily upgradable)

Ah ok. Is it The Sims 1 or Sims 3? Because Sims 3 has been ported to mac, on the Origin store. Basically Origin is available for OSx and Windows. I am not sure how Skyrim would run on a 330M GPU but having checked the system requirements you'd need at least 6GB of RAM, if you didn't have the upgraded 8GB. Other then that it should run. Just don't expect breathtaking scenes. On my A1206 I got rid of the DVD drive and replaced it with a second hard drive using one of these. The DVD drive then went into a USB enclosure like this. So in that case I would just try to replace your problem parts with new ones and maybe grab some spares. If you are interested in a screen I have one for sale for the A1260.

edit: you should be able to copy your keys over from whatever format you have into origin or steam to make it easier ;)

I just installed arch linux over osx and am now happily single booting linux. :)
Software related you can install a customizable window manager, the ones that Sylinn recommended are fantastic options.
Hardware related, I think that the best purchase I have ever made, hands down, is an ssd. It has made things SOOOOOOO much faster, here is what I got (the 240gb version):

http://www.amazon.com/Kingston-HyperX-2-5-Inch-SH103S3-120G/dp/B007R67FNA/ref=sr_1_4?ie=UTF8&qid=1396322635&sr=8-4&keywords=kingston+ssd

It is super easy to install, though they are a little pricey its totally worth it. I have a macbook pro 2010 model, so I also replaced the CD drive with my old hdd with the help of a hard drive caddy like this:

http://www.amazon.com/Drive-Unibody-MacBook-SuperDrive-Replacement/dp/B0058AH2US/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1396322738&sr=8-1&keywords=macbook+pro+caddy

Which was a little harder to install, but not impossible by any means. And its cheap!

If you are so inclined, Samsung just released a line of very affordable ssds up to a terabyte in size for only like 500 bucks (I say only, but for a terabyte ssd thats unheard of). Macs are known for being non-customizable, and apple takes pride in that, but with the help of a very small screwdriver you at least have access to the harddrive, memory, and CD superdrive, which is as good as most other laptops.