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Maxupgrades/OWC Macbook Pro SSD Optical Drive bay Adapter

admin — Fri, 11 Mar 2011 05:54:18 +0000

Some pics of the Macbook Pro Optical bay adapter installation that I purchased from Maxupgrades (www.maxupgrades.com), which appears to be the same as the ‘DataDoubler‘ sold by OWC. And while I generally prefer ordering from OWC, it doesn’t appear that they offer the same usb superdrive case.

The optical drive bracket is made of a solid piece of aluminum, in which the disk drive (SSD in this case) is mounted. The SATA adapter circuit board is attached to the bracket by the way of three screws. The hard disk is then mounted to the bracket by two screws on one side of the drive. I have no worries about mounting an SSD drive in this adapter, but it would have been nice to have all four mounting points of the drive used.

The external USB powered superdrive kit is nearly identical to the Macbook Air Superdrive. Obviously, the build quality is lacking in this knockoff , as the entire top is relatively flimsy plastic, where the Air Superdrive is sturdy aluminum, but it gets the job done and far better than some of the other external slim dvd cases that I’ve seen.

The Maxupgrades Optical Bay kit including usb case for Superdrive

The cheap, but perfectly adequate, set of tools included in the kit.

The optical drive bay frame. Solid piece of aluminum and is a perfect fit.

A view of the the OWC SSD drive mounted in the optical drive bay adapter.

Bottom view of SSD drive and SATA adapter

: The USB case looks very much like the Air Superdrive

The Superdrive just sort of wedges into the case.

: Optical bay adapter mounted in the 17inch Macbook Pro.

iMac 27-inch SSD Install (Out with the Superdrive, in with the SSD)

admin — Tue, 12 Jan 2010 22:56:59 +0000

Being in that the optical drive in the iMac uses a full speed SATA connection (albeit using a ‘slimline’ SATA connector), and the fact that I rarely use optical media – I decided to swap out the Superdrive with a 128GB SSD drive.

Not large enough to use for all of the data on the iMac, but more than enough for the OS, all of my apps, and even a couple VMWare fusion images I use on a regular basis. Meanwhile the 1TB 3.5 drive handles all the rest of the junk (download files, iTunes library, etc.)

The results – After cloning my boot drive (SuperDuper), and restarting – the boot time was cut down to less than 1/4 of what it was with the 1TB drive. Launch times on big/slow apps (Eclipse, DBvisualizer, MS Word,etc.) is incredible.

Notes: The slimline 2.5 Caddy was purchased from NewmodeUS.

A couple pics:

SSD Drive and Slimline sata drive caddy

SSD Mounted in Caddy

The iMac opened up, exposing the Superdrive

SSD installed

iMac 27 Takeapart

admin — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 17:53:01 +0000

Just some pics from taking apart my new 27-inch iMac.

The pictures will just have to speak for themselves for the time being.

Project ‘DorkPro’

admin — Sat, 11 Apr 2009 19:53:24 +0000

I recently decided to trade up from my Mac Mini, and into something a bit more powerful. Which led me to create the ‘DorkPro‘.

Made out of cheap PC hardware and put into carefully wedged into a discarded G5 case, the Dork Pro performs like a real Mac Pro, at a fraction of the cost.

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Mac Mini eSATA

admin — Sat, 11 Apr 2009 03:24:31 +0000

Warranties be damned. This article explains how to connect larger/faster full size 3.5-inch hard disks to Mac Mini using eSATA.

The Mac Mini is modified to route the internal SATA port to be used as an eSATA connection, providing full native SATA speed, which is much faster than Firewire 400 or USB 2.0.

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