[nthd]

It appears that the optibay is just a custom mount for a hard drive that installs in the optical bay of the macbook along with an adapter cable.

from mce..
"Besides just appearing different, laptop optical drives and hard drives have very different data connectors as well, so an adapter was developed allowing the hard drive to communicate with your MacBook Pro, MacBook, or PowerBook G4 through the optical drive connector on the motherboard. Since they already speak the same language, ATA, not one bit of speed or performance is lost in adapting the drive's connector."

Anyone know where to find such an adapter or how to wire one yourself? I think I could manage making my own mount, so it would be sweet if I could just find a cheap adapter and do this myself.

[nthd]

This is the item I'm referring to...

MCE OptiBay Hard Drive for MacBook Pro, MacBook and PowerBook G4

[mduell]

You need to buy something like Notebook Slim Optical Drive to IDE Adapter/Converter
The "trick" is to find one that will fit inside the optical bay. I'm not sure if that one will.

edit: Here's a pretty small one: Notebook Slim CD to Desktop IDE CD Converter

[nthd]

Thanks Mark, I think I'll give this a shot when I get my mbp back from apple. If I accidentally manage to make this work I'll post.

[mduell]

Actually, ignore both of those links; they're for mounting a laptop optical drive in a desktop computer. You need one to put a notebook hard drive in a laptop optical bay. Same idea, but different plugs.

See if you can find a Dell modular bay hard drive caddy on eBay... it may fit in the Macbook after just ripping off the face plate, or you may have to rip apart the whole thing to extract the adapter board.

edit: Jesus, the dell modular bay hard drives are expensive. Scratch that idea.

[nthd]

Well I could use the adapter you mentioned to connect to the laptop's optical connection and then use another adapter, standard 40 pin ide connector to notebook ide connector to hook up the drive. Is that possible? Does that exist?

[gooser]

a far easier solution would be just to buy the damn thing from mce.