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The MCE OptiBay was created for users who want as much hard drive capacity as possible inside their MacBook Pro, MacBook, PowerBook G4, iMac, or Mac mini. It replaces your machine's internal SuperDrive with a high performance SATA hard drive, or SSD (Solid-State Drive), of up to 1000GB.

Now you can have previously unheard of capacities and speed in laptop disk storage and space for everything you need to store... digital video, music, photos, etc.
Two bootable drives inside your system provide a freedom and flexibility never before experienced in a Mac laptop...
Have one disk a scratch disk and the other your system/applications disk, RAID configurations, one disk Mac and the other PC, extra photo storage for digital photographers, extra music storage for digital DJ's, and more.

Your Laptop, Your Way

The OptiBay is a high performance laptop hard drive, or SSD, inside a specially designed, lightweight enclosure 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 Drive can 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 or SSD 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, SATA, 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 is now connected to its optical drive connector. It recognizes it as just another high-speed drive connected to its ATA bus, or SATA bus, and communicates with it just as it would any other storage device. Remember, you have a Mac where stuff just works! You even use Apple's own Disk Utility program to easily setup and partition, if desired, the OptiBay Hard Drive, or SSD, however you'd like: As a standard 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.

MCE OptiBay Utlity

Included with every OptiBay is the MCE OptiBay Utlity program. This is software we created specifically for OptiBay users and allows them greater flexibility when using their, now external, SuperDrive (DVD Drive) that was removed when installing the OptiBay. The MCE OptiBay Utility program activates the Apple DVD Player application so that it can now play movie DVDs from an external SuperDrive when there is no internal SuperDrive in the system. As well, if you ever reinstall your SuperDrive back into your machine our OptiBay Utility program will allow the Apple DVD Player application to again play movie DVDs from the internal SuperDrive. The OptiBay utility program is compatible with Mac OS 10.4 through the recently released Mac OS 10.8 (Mountain Lion). It also provides other functionality when using the OptiBay and this is fully detailed in the program and accompanying Read Me file.

Safe, Time Machine Safe

For full protection from hard drive failure everyone agrees that backing up is the key. For those in situations where being as fail-safe as possible is more important than the extra capacity, you have the option of mirroring your entire internal hard drive to the OptiBay . Or configure Time Machine (through the Time Machine System Preference) or your favorite backup utility, to backup to the OptiBay regularly... and do so at fast SATA speeds! That way, if the unthinkable happens and your internal hard drive goes down, or you delete a file you shouldn't have, you won't miss a single beat since you'll be able to easily switch over and work seamlessly, or pull up a saved Time Machine, from the OptiBay and you're back in business. The OptiBay 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 OptiBay is bootable, and for extra security, you could setup one drive as a Mac OS drive and the other as a dedicated Windows drive on MacBook Pros and MacBooks.

Power S.M.A.R.T.

The OptiBay 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 OptiBay falls within the heat and power specifications 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 Drive installed is affected by only 10 to 15%... even less if you're using an SSD in the OptiBay. The Mac OS will even spin the OptiBay down when not in use if you check the "Put the hard disk(s) to sleep when possible" checkbox in the Energy Saver System Preference.

Also included with every MCE OptiBay is a free USB 2.0 SuperDrive Enclosure to ensure that you still have full functionality of the original internal SuperDrive you just removed from your system.
This slim, portable, external USB 2.0 enclosure transforms your original SuperDrive drive into a bootable, bus-powered SuperDrive just as compatible with iTunes, iDVD, Finder Burning, Toast, DVD Player etc. as before

OptiBay Drive at a Glance

• Up to 1TB (1,000GB) additional internal hard disk, or SSD, storage
• Up to 2TB total internal hard disk, or SSD, storage!
• Purchase with pre-installed hard disk, or use with your own 2.5" SATA Hard Drive or SSD
• Can be used as an individual volume, as part of a RAID array, or combined with internal storage 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
• Includes free, portable, USB 2.0 enclosure for SuperDrive
• 3 Year Warranty