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Tuoder · Nov 1, 2006, 03:10 PM

Ok, so i saw this link here at MacNN:

MCE OptiBay Hard Drive for MacBook Pro and PowerBook G4

It gave me a bit of an idea. A CD drive is about 5-1/2 inches wide, all told. A laptop hard drive is about 2-3/4 inches wide. My Macbook uses ATA for the optical drive. If I got a pair of laptop hardrives and took my Macbook apart, do you guys think it would be possible to fit them in there and hook them up and mount them? The cables I want may not be available, but adapters are. I am not sure. What do you guys think?

Also, do you think that boot camp would pick them up as internal drives so that I could put windows on one?

SSharon · Nov 1, 2006, 04:22 PM

Seems like a waste of power. Why not just get a larger drive and partition it.

Tuoder · Nov 1, 2006, 04:37 PM

Originally Posted by SSharon

Seems like a waste of power. Why not just get a larger drive and partition it.

RAID 0, and prodigious hard drive space in a laptop. I have noticed that I don't use my optical drive a whole lot, and in many cases, I am burning stuff just to get it off of the hard drive. The thing is, I am worried about screwing things up. I kind of want to practice on something cheap. I might take apart my PBG3.

Waragainstsleep · Nov 2, 2006, 05:27 AM

Heat is an issue. One that will void your warranty if you leave any evidence. Which you will unless you buy another optical drive cable to hack.

Tuoder · Nov 2, 2006, 02:25 PM

Originally Posted by Waragainstsleep

Heat is an issue. One that will void your warranty if you leave any evidence. Which you will unless you buy another optical drive cable to hack.

I wonder if that will be a big deal, heat that is. Perhaps using 4200rpm drives would help?

vmarks · Nov 2, 2006, 10:04 PM

the problem is one of buses.

You have an ide bus that has one channel, master and slave. that's your hdd and optical currently.
What bus will you place the third one on? The only way I can see is to get a USB to SATA bridge and run the usb off the motherboard contacts internally.

Possible, but unsure of the wisdom.

slpdLoad · Nov 2, 2006, 11:22 PM

I'll throw this in there: I don't know what model laptop, but I've heard of people installing bluetooth dongles via usb inside some Apple laptops. Any way you could utilize one of your USB or Firewire ports and somehow route it to the drive? I realize you need a firewire/usb interface chip or whatever for the drive, but maybe you can fit that in there with the drive.

Either way, it's a cool concept.

Cheers

Edit: Nevermind, didn't realize vmarks already said that as an option.

Tomchu · Nov 2, 2006, 11:28 PM

No, the hard drive in the Macbook is SATA, technically leaving him with two IDE channels left on the Intel southbridge.

Tuoder · Nov 3, 2006, 12:40 PM

Originally Posted by vmarks

the problem is one of buses.

You have an ide bus that has one channel, master and slave. that's your hdd and optical currently.
What bus will you place the third one on? The only way I can see is to get a USB to SATA bridge and run the usb off the motherboard contacts internally.

Possible, but unsure of the wisdom.

Originally Posted by Tomchu

No, the hard drive in the Macbook is SATA, technically leaving him with two IDE channels left on the Intel southbridge.

Tomchu has is right. The current internal HDD is SATA. The Combo drive is PATA. The problem I am having with this is that I need to hook up the hard drives with a bit of space efficiency.

vmarks · Nov 4, 2006, 09:53 AM

Sorry, I was getting a little confused, I say MCE for macbook PRO and powerbook, and made the bad leap that you wouldn't do this on a macbook, but on an powerbook.

Again, sorry for misunderstanding.

In a MacBook?

Fine, so you've got the PATA when you remove the combo, but you're going to need to make up some cable for this exercise, and that takes up physical space as well. I've made up desktop cables, but never laptop ones. There's a reason they use the plastic flex cable instead of real wire core cable, space and routing it.

You might still have an easier time of it using a usb bridge board and connecting to the usb port on the inside than making up an ide cable for this.

Waragainstsleep · Nov 6, 2006, 05:20 AM

I should mention that I was told by an Apple employee (Not an Applecare agent, one of the senior Apple tech guys in the UK) that fitting as much as a 7200rpm SATA HD in a MacBook will void the warranty. Fitting two drives at any speed in place of the optical is going to add more heat than upgrading the stock HD I would think.
Having said that, I do like this idea. You may be able to compensate for heat using one of the SMC fan control utilities. It will shorten your battery life even further of course. If speed is the issue rather than space, you might think about using compact flash adaptors.

Also RAIDing two drives on the same ATA bus will not get you any speed increase. RAID is faster because it is able to write to two or more drives at once, if you check the specs on the old Xserve G4, you will see it has 4 independent ATA busses (yes, technically, you can fit two drives to each one, just not in the case!). This is done with good reason.

If we were talking PowerBooks, you could indeed RAID across two drives with full benefits from doing so. Only two drives though, not three. And I'm not sure how good an idea it is to boot from a RAIDed volume. I know most people argue against it.

In terms of replacing the optical drive however, one could try partitioning the second drive and imaging the OS X install discs onto one partition. That way you can still run maintenance and get your Mac going again if it has big problems.

Tuoder · Nov 6, 2006, 03:41 PM

I realize that the warranty would be long gone if I did this.

I thought that an individual PATA drive was not capable of maxing out the interface. Therefore, you would get more performance out of two RAID 0 drives n the same bus.

I was also thinking, what if I removed the original SATA drive and put in one of those eSATA adapters. Then I would have eSATA in my MacBook.

SSharon · Nov 15, 2006, 12:25 PM

Originally Posted by Waragainstsleep

And I'm not sure how good an idea it is to boot from a RAIDed volume. I know most people argue against it.

Can anyone confirm this? I plan on mirroring my boot drive this weekend.

Even though the bus may not be saturated writing to one drive it still can only write to one drive at a time.

Tomchu · Nov 15, 2006, 01:37 PM

There's nothing wrong with booting from a RAIDed volume. Obviously the catches of using RAID 0/1 apply too.

M4LFUNCT10N · Dec 29, 2006, 01:48 AM

Go for it! I ripped the floppy drive out of my Toshiba and had enough room to create an internal docking port for an external 2.5" HDD case/drive. I routed a USB cable inside the laptop and glued the hard drive side of the cable in place creating an internal/external drive. Pull the hard drive out and you have an external 2.5" hard drive. Hot swappable too!

Waragainstsleep · Jan 2, 2007, 06:35 PM

RAID has two functions: Speed and redundancy. Straight mirroring is entirely dedicated to redundancy, striping across two drive is all about the speed. The other types are a mixture of the two.
The speed is achieved by dividing data between multiple busses. a 1GB file takes (for example) one minute to write to a single drive when the bus is maxxed out. A striped pair of drives would ideally have identical busses, so only 500MB has to write to each drive, taking 30 seconds.
If both drives are on the same bus, then the transfer will not be any quicker, since that bus was maxxed at 1GB/min. The only advantage you have then is that your two drives now appear as a single larger volume.
Thats the principle at any rate.