Re: MCE OptiBay Hard Drive
OptiBay Hard Drive At a Glance
- Up to 500GB additional internal hard disk storage
- Up to 1TB total internal hard disk storage!
- Can be used as an individual volume, as part of a RAID array, or combined with internal hard drive as one very large volume
- Bootable
- Easy setup using Apple's Disk Utility program
- Neglible impact on battery life
- S.M.A.R.T. drive status compliant
- Optional external SuperDrive or optical drive enclosure
- 3 Year Warranty
Features:
- Capacities of 250GB, 320GB, and 500GB
- High Performance Spindle Speeds of 5400RPM and 7200RPM
- Bootable
- S.M.A.R.T. Status Compliant
- Sets up easily using Apple's Disk Utility program
- Can be set up as a single volume, partitioned, or made part of RAID array
- External Enclosure for SuperDrive or Combo drive compatible with iDVD, DVD Studio Pro, iTunes, iPhoto, and Finder Burning
Includes:
- MCE OptiBay Hard Drive or purchase just the OptiBay Encosure for use with your own 2.5" SATA Hard Drive
- External USB 2.0 Optical Drive or Optical Drive Enclosure (optional)
- Installation Instructions
- Installation Toolkit
- User's Guide
Re: MCE OptiBay Hard Drive
MCE Technologies is again breaking ground with the new MCE OptiBay Hard Drive. Since the mid-1990's, MCE has designed and engineered hard drive and SuperDrive upgrades exclusively for PowerBooks. Those PowerBooks used to have what was called an "Expansion Bay" slot giving users a tremendous amount of flexibility in how they use their machines. We created "Expansion Bay Hard Drives" for those machines, (still available today), that allow users to easily replace their expansion bay optical drives with a removable hard drive. Apple's introduction of the PowerBook G4 in 2001 and their quest for the thinnest notebook in the world eliminated the possibility for an expansion bay slot and users have been limited to a permanent, built-in optical drive ever since. Not any more!
While They have been busily shipping SuperDrive upgrades for the PowerBook G4 for many years and continued to hear from customers yearning for the old days when the optical drive was removable so they can put a hard drive in its place. they also found many users out there doing high end HD and DV editing with Final Cut Pro and for whom an abundance of hard drive space is an absolute necessity... more necessary than having a built-in optical drive. For those pro users and for users who simply want more hard drive space inside their MacBook Pro or PowerBook G4 for their music, video, and photo libraries we created the OptiBay Hard Drive. Take your SuperDrive out and put an OptiBay Hard Drive in and give yourself up to an extra 500GB of high performance hard drive space to use however you'd like. Combine it with up to a 500GB internal hard drive and find out what a dream it is to have up to 1TB of hard drive space inside your laptop.
Re: MCE OptiBay Hard Drive
Your Laptop, Your Way
The MCE OptiBay Hard Drive is a high performance laptop hard drive inside a specially designed, lightweight case that's been engineered to the exact same dimensions as your laptop's SuperDrive or Combo drive. We made the case so lightweight, in fact, that replacing your optical drive with an MCE OptiBay Hard Drive will actually shave up to a quarter pound off the weight of your MacBook Pro, MacBook or PowerBook G4! 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.
Communicate Natively
Speaking of communications, your Mac won't even mind that the OptiBay Hard Drive is now connected to its optical drive connector. It recognizes it as just another hard drive connected to its ATA bus, or SATA bus in the case of MacBook Pro and MacBook Unibody systems, and communicates with it just as it would any other hard drive. Remember, you have a Mac where stuff just works! You even use Apple's own Disk Utility program to easily setup and partition the OptiBay Hard Drive however you'd like: As a standard hard drive volume showing up as its own icon on your desktop, in conjunction with your internal hard drive as part of a RAID 0 (Striped) or RAID 1 (Mirrored) array, or concatenated (combined) with your internal hard drive so they appear as one large hard drive are just a few of the many possibilities.
Fail-Safe Drive Dedication
For full protection from hard drive failure everyone agrees that redundancy is the key. For those in situations where being as fail-safe as possible is more important than the extra capacity, you may opt to clone your entire internal hard drive to the MCE OptiBay Hard Drive and, with the included BounceBack Express backup software, schedule backups to the OptiBay Hard Drive at regular, perhaps even daily, intervals. That way if your PowerBook or MacBook Pro's internal hard drive ever goes down you won't miss a single beat since you can immediately switch over and work seamlessly from the OptiBay Drive. The MCE OptiBay Hard Drive can also be used as a scratch disk for your data, doing all the heavy work and not bogged down having to run system routines simultaneously. Since the MCE OptiBay Hard Drive is bootable and for extra security, you could setup one drive as a Mac OS drive and the other as a dedicated Windows XP drive on MacBook Pros.
Power S.M.A.R.T.
The MCE OptiBay Hard Drive responds to S.M.A.R.T. status commands from the Mac OS. S.M.A.R.T. status commands query a drive's internal reliability algorithms and can, therefore, warn of possible impending disk failure long before it happens giving you enough time to archive your data before it's lost. In addition, the MCE OptiBay Hard Drive falls within the heat and power dissipation specification for the optical drive it is replacing and also has built-in power management routines which allow it to use even less power. Depending on the spindle speed of the drive, battery life between charges with an OptiBay Hard Drive installed is affected by only 10 to 15%. The Mac OS will even spin the OptiBay Hard Drive down when not in use if instructed to do so in the Energy Saver preference panel within System Preferences.
SuperDrive - External
In order to maintain the CD/DVD read/write functionality of the original internal optical drive replaced by the OptiBay Hard Drive with the MacBook Pro 17-inch and PowerBook G4, you can choose to include a Portable USB 2.0 Optical Drive Enclosure Kit into which you may install the SuperDrive or Combo drive removed from the MacBook Pro. This slim external USB 2.0 enclosure transforms your optical drive into a bootable, bus-powered SuperDrive or Combo drive just as compatible with iTunes, iDVD and Finder Burning as before. Now just plug in your external SuperDrive or Combo drive to your USB 2.0 port only when needed in order to play, burn, or rip CDs or DVDs or to load new system software or applications. You can also choose the MCE External 20X DVD-/+R/RW + Dual/Double Layer FireWire and USB 2.0 SuperDrive to instead have the functionality of a higher-speed CD/DVD reader/writer at your disposal in a more stationary desktop form factor. You can also choose not include any optical drive option in the event you already have an external optical drive of your own.
Re: MCE OptiBay Hard Drive
The MacBook and MacBook Pro 15-inch make use of a non-standard 9.5mm internal SuperDrive. Since there are no external enclosures available for this type of SuperDrive, MCE gives you the option of a complete portable 8X DVD±R/RW + Dual/Double Layer bus-powered USB 2.0 SuperDrive, or the desktop DVD±R/RW + Dual/Double Layer FireWire/USB 2.0 SuperDrive.
You may install the MCE OptiBay yourself* or, if you prefer, you may have it professionally installed into your MacBook Pro or PowerBook G4 by MCE Technologies or one of our worldwide Authorized Upgrade Centers.
*NOTE for 12-inch PowerBook G4 Owners: MCE highly recommends that your drive be professionally installed. The installation of the MCE OptiBay Hard drive into the 12-inch PowerBook G4 involves the removal of some 40 plus screws and parts and is not for the faint of heart. Only an experienced technician should attempt this upgrade into the 12-inch PowerBook G4.
Compatible with All MacBook Pro, MacBook and PowerBook G4 Systems
The MCE OptiBay Hard Drive Do-It-Yourself Upgrade is compatible with the first-generation and Unibody 17-inch and 15-inch MacBook Pro, the first-generation and Unibody 13.3-inch MacBook and also the 17-inch, 15-inch, and 12-inch Apple PowerBook G4.
System Requirements:First-generation or Unibody MacBook Pro (15-inch or 17-inch) or MacBook (13.3-inch) running Mac OS 10.4.x or later. PowerBook G4 (12-inch Aluminum, 15-inch Aluminum or Titanium, or 17-inch Aluminum) running Mac OS 9, Mac OS 10.2, Mac OS 10.3, Mac OS 10.4 (or later) Full Disc Burning compatibility with external CD/DVD burner requires Mac OS 10.4 or later. PowerBook G4 15-inch Titanium DVD-ROM only drive not compatible with Portable External Enclosure
