Second Hard Drive In A Macbook Pro

Picture 4 (Custom)

[Reid] wrote in to show us how to add a second hard drive to his Macbook Pro. He found that he hardly ever used his DVD drive, so sacrificed it in favor of added storage. What he found was that it had a proprietary adapter that he was unable to find for sale anywhere. Making an adapter may seem like a pretty simple hack, but this could save some people considerable time. Its also worth noting that upgrading the firmware got him an 18% speed increase, so don’t ignore those updates. We don’t see too many mac hacks around here, you may recall the mac tablet hacks and the logo monitor.

23 thoughts on “Second Hard Drive In A Macbook Pro

  1. Take a look at a “SATA HDD Caddy Adapter For Thinkpad T400” on eBay. It has the same small SATA connector in what looks like the same position. Ya, putting x-IBM stuff in an Mac may cause it to spontaneously collapse into a black hole, but for $14 it is worth trying. #8^}

  2. Nice one Matt, thats exactly what I’ve been looking for. I think I’m going to order one right now…

    What do you guys think? a 320gig 7200 for $90 for main drive, and a 500gig 5400 for 90 for a second drive?

    Or should I just wait and get two 500gig 7200 when they drop in price?

  3. @yrb

    Awww… Come on, I’ve been called worse by mac users. ‘freetard’ comes to mind. Of course darwin is based on ‘freetard’ programming. Too bad for me I can’t get a unix operating system on my toshiba… I guess I’m just jealous.

  4. That connector looks like a limline SATA connector common on slimline SATA optical drives. AFAIK, it is not proprietary (part of the current spec) and adaptor cables can be found online and even in some computer stores (just saw some at my local Microcenter last week).

  5. you can get mce optibay’s for under 20$ shipping included by typing “optibay” on ebay, got mine this way and it’s working fine with an ocz vertex 2, got sata3 so I get speeds of around 150mb/s

  6. I installed a PATA ebay version but the disk is not appearing on my system. I got a replacement opti-bay but same thing happens. If I swap back the CD drive that works fine.
    Am I missing something?

  7. Hi,
    I just installed 2 OCZ vertex 3 SSD’s into my 2011 Macbook pro, but at first it would only recognize one of the hard drives, so I switched them, now it doesn’t recognize any. I am booting up from an external drive, but when I go into Disc Utilities I don’t see any other drives now. I have checked all the connections and as far as I can tell everything is hooked up right.
    Any suggestions?

    1. This may be late coming to you, but I had a problem shortly after installing an SSD drive. It turned out to be the ribbon cable that fails after a short time of the faster data. I had our local service replace the cable as there are no after-market options. It has worked great for several months now after the replacement. This was on the Mid 2009 MBP 13.

  8. so once you add the hard drive, how would i go about making that hard drive the main bootable drive, and move over the content from my other hard drive. without reformatting or losing anything from the first drive?

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