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January 8, 2007

OptiBay Adds Second Hard Drive to MacBooks and 15" MacBook Pros

According to an article on Macworld News, MCE Technologies announced on Friday that its OptiBay product for MacBooks and 15" MacBook Pro laptops has begun shipping.

The OptiBay functions as a second internal hard drive that fits where the laptop's optical drive should be.

The price, which includes an external optical drive that replaces the one being swapped out, begins at $329. The hard drives are available in capacities ranging form 80 gigabytes to 160 gigabytes, most functioning at 5400 RPM. A 100 GB hard drive which operates at 7200 RPM will be offered for $459. The external optical drive shipped with the units includes a USB 2.0 8x SuperDrive which also burns double layer DVD-ROM disks (functionally identical to the optical drive that's being swapped out). An upgraded 16x DVD burner with USB 2.0 and Firewire interfaces is available for an extra $20.

MCE includes a full tool kit and owner's manual to help with the installation, which the user performs by themselves. The firm has been offering the OptiBay kit for the PowerBook G4 and 17" MacBook Pro laptops since October of 2006.

The OptiBay expansion requires Mac OS X 10.4 or later for the MacBook Pro 15" and 17" configurations and the MacBook configuration. Systems running Mac OS 9 and Mac OS X 10.2 or later will be able to use the drive on the PowerBook G4 series

If you have any comments or feedback, let us know.

Posted by chrisbarylick at January 8, 2007 3:30 PM
Category: News
Buy from: Apple, iTunes, Amazon.

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Comments

The option seems to be pull the CD/DVD drive and carry a portable USB2 CD/DVD drive, or leave it in and carry a smaller FW hard drive, or... with 250 and 300GB drives coming soon, simply upgrade your HD. Especially since things like BootCamp and Parallels don't run off external/secondary drives.

This almost seems to be an interim solution in search of a problem.

Posted by: Michael Long at January 8, 2007 3:57 PM

Or use 2 SSD disks with the ZFS filesystem and have a superfast MacBook :)

Posted by: Daan Kortenbach at January 9, 2007 3:02 AM

Time Machine. Time Machine.

Posted by: Joost de Haas at January 9, 2007 4:24 AM

January 8, 2007

OptiBay Adds Second Hard Drive to MacBooks and 15" MacBook Pros

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