Adding a second Hard Drive to Mac Book Pro
I can’t take full credit for this project. I first saw this on hackaday.com (link) digging through their archives.
Someone named Reid had submitted his project to add a second hard drive.
So one day I decided to add a drive to mine. I had looked around and saw a few drive caddies for macbooks online but they were all about 50 bucks, the most popular being the OptiBay by MCE. It seems like a good deal, but as everyone who knows me knows I’m a cheap bastard. So I decided to do it myself using Reid’s instructions.
But I ran into an issue. Do I order the parts online and wait? Do I go to the local electronics store and buy them? Well I decided to go to the store….surprise surprise they did not have the parts I needed. Needless to say I had a sad. Until I remembered that I have never let a connector stop my projects before!
So I bought a male to female slime line sata connector chopped off the power section of the female side and spliced in a sata power connector. The result was this lil bastard.
I had a bit of a rough time sorting out the power cable as my parts did not line up with his instructions.
But they were close enough and quick look up of the slim line sata power pinout (link) got me to where I needed to be.
Once done I grabbed my drive and promptly shoved it into the space the DVD drive was in.
It was a very tight fit at first, but taking my time to tape everything down allowed me to replace the bottom of my laptop without any un-apple like lumps.
This is the end result. I powered up the laptop, formatted the disk and promptly started to fill it up.
I have not had the time to properly test the throughput or the power usage of the laptop. But as soon as I do I will post the results.
