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Charles Moore's The Agenda - A Terabyte Of Storage Inside Your 'Book!
Thursday, May 15 2008 @ 11:00 AM ET | Article Link
Up To 1TB Now Available Inside Your MacBook Pro, MacBook, or PowerBook G4
A terabyte is an awful lot of data space. It blows me away that the 500 GB Maxtor 7200 RPM hard drive in my SimpleTech Pininfarina SimpleDrive external hard drive has 1000 times the storage capacity of the 500 MB drive that I thought was pretty roomy in my first Apple laptop - a 1996 PowerBook 5300. I've been using the SimpleDrive for data backups for more than a year now -- since last November for Time Machine backups, and it still has more than 300 GB free space. Amazing!
And yet, there are users for whom even 500 GB is not adequate - people who work with video or just like to collect movies, for example, and the relatively limited capacity ceiling has been an inhibitor to them working with notebook computers rather than desktop machines, but now long-established Apple laptop storage media specialists MCE have addressed that limitation with their new MCE OptiBay Hard Drive, which was created for users who want as much hard drive space as possible inside their MacBook Pro, MacBook, or PowerBook G4... period.
The MCE OptiBay Hard Drive replaces your 'Book's internal SuperDrive optical drive with a high performance hard drive. Two bootable hard drives inside your notebook provides tremendous flexibility. For example, you can have one disk a scratch disk and use the other as your system/applications disk, set up RAID configurations, make one disk your Mac OS disk and the other Windows, have extra music storage to satisfy a digital DJs, do high end HD and DV editing with Final Cut Pro, and so forth. You can still have an external SuperDrive or other optical drive in an enclosure for your removed SuperDrive or Combo drive so you'll still have CD/DVD read/write functionality anytime you want for loading system software or applications, as well as burning, playing, or ripping CDs and DVDs - which is the same motif that MacBook Air users have available, and no serious hardship for most of us.
MCE has lots of experience in engineering innovative enhancements to Apple laptop storage technology. Since the mid-'90s they've been designing and marketing hard drive and optical upgrades exclusively for PowerBooks, which from the PowerBook 5300 and 190 through the PowerBook G3 Series 2000 "Pismo" came with a removable-device expansion bay slot that provided users a luxurious amount of flexibility in how they use their machines. MCE 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 (or other type of drive; I have SuperDrive, Zip, and SuperDisk modules for my Pismos). Unhappily, Apple's introduction of the PowerBook G4 in 2001 launching 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. Until now.
For those users who want more hard drive space inside their MacBook Pro or PowerBook G4 for their music, video, and photo libraries the MCE OptiBay Hard Drive is your solution. Take your SuperDrive out, put an OptiBay Hard Drive in, and you have up to 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.
OptiBay Hard Drive Features
• 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
• Negligible impact on battery life
• S.M.A.R.T. drive status compliant
• Optional FireWire SuperDrive or optical drive enclosure
• 3 Year Warranty
The MCE OptiBay Hard Drive is a high performance laptop hard drive mounted inside a lightweight housing that's been engineered to the match exact same dimensions as your laptop's SuperDrive or Combo drive. An extra bonus from this mod is that replacing your optical drive with an MCE OptiBay Hard Drive will shave up to a quarter pound off the weight of your MacBook Pro, MacBook or PowerBook G4. To accommodate the different data connector protocols, a no efficiency loss adapter was developed allowing the hard drive to communicate through the optical drive connector on the notebook's motherboard.
The laptop recognizes it as just another volume connected to its ATA bus and communicates with it just as it would any other hard drive, and it can be easily set up and partition in conjunction with your main 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 - just a few of a number of possibilities.
For those in situations where being as fail-safe as possible is more important than the extra capacity, you can 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 (or of course use the second hard drive as your destination drive for self-contained Time Machine automated backups). That way if your PowerBook or MacBook Pro's internal hard drive ever goes down you won't miss a beat since you can immediately switch over and work seamlessly from the OptiBay Drive. If maximum speed performance is of the essence, the MCE OptiBay Hard Drive can also be used as a scratch disk for your swapfile or virtual memory data, doing all the heavy work and not bogged down having to run system routines simultaneously.
The MCE OptiBay Hard Drive runs 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 approximately 10 to 15%. The Mac OS can spin the OptiBay Hard Drive down when not in use if instructed to do so in the Energy Saver preference panel in the System Preferences.
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 use a MCE Portable FireWire/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 FireWire/USB 2.0 enclosure transforms your optical drive into a bootable, bus-powered SuperDrive or Combo retaining full compatibility that can be plugged into a FireWire or USB 2.0 port 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 18x DVD-/+R/RW + Dual/Double Layer FireWire/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.
The MacBook and MacBook Pro 15-inch use 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 FireWire/USB 2.0 SuperDrive, or the desktop 18X DVD±R/RW + Dual/Double Layer FireWire/USB 2.0 SuperDrive.
If you're handy with tools, you can install the MCE OptiBay yourself, although for 12-inch PowerBook G4 Owners: MCE strongly recommends that you leave that job to a professional tech since installation of the MCE OptiBay Hard drive in the 12-incher involves the removal of some 40 plus screws and parts and is not for the faint of heart. If you prefer, these upgrades can be installed by MCE Technologies or one of their worldwide Authorized Upgrade Centers, for a fee of course.
The MCE OptiBay Hard Drive is compatible with the 17" and 15" MacBook Pro, the 13.3" MacBook and also the 17", 15", and 12" Apple PowerBook G4.
System Requirements:
MacBook Pro (15" or 17") or MacBook (13.3") running Mac OS 10.4.x or later. PowerBook G4 (12" Aluminum, 15" Aluminum or Titanium, or 17" Aluminum) running Mac OS 9, Mac OS 10.2, Mac OS 10.3, Mac OS 10.4 (or later) Full Disc Burning compatibility with FireWire or USB 2.0 enclosure requires Mac OS 10.4 or later. PowerBook G4 15" Titanium DVD-ROM only drive not compatible with FireWire Enclosure.
For more information, visit:
http://www.mcetech.com/optibay/
You can also order direct from MCE 24-hours a day, or call 1-800-5000-MAC.
bookmystique@pbcentral.com
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