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MCE Replaces Apple Internal Optical SuperDrive by HDD up to 500GB

$449 for this half-terabyte capacity

The new MCE OptiBay Hard Drive from MCE Technologies, LLC was created for users who want as much hard drive space as possible inside their MacBook Pro, MacBook, or PowerBook G4. The MCE OptiBay Hard Drive replaces your machine’s internal SuperDrive with a high performance hard drive. Now you can have unheard of capacities in laptop disk storage space for everything you need to store… digital video, music, photos, etc. Two bootable hard 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 music storage for digital DJ’s, and more. Plus, you have the option of including an external SuperDrive or optical drive 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.

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MCE OptiBay Hard Drive for MacBook Pro 17-inch

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.

While we have been busily shipping SuperDrive upgrades for the PowerBook G4 for many years we’ve 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. We’ve 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’ve invented the OptiBay Hard Drive. Take your SuperDrive out and put an OptiBay Hard Drive in and give yourself up to an extra 250GB of high performance hard drive space to use however you’d like. Combine it with up to a 250GB internal hard drive and find out what a dream it is to have up to 500GB (a half-terabyte!) of hard drive space inside your laptop.

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.

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 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.

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.


FireWire SuperDrive Enclosure
SuperDrive – Externa
l
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 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 drive just as compatible with iTunes, iDVD and Finder Burning as before. Now just plug in your external SuperDrive or Combo drive to your FireWire or 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 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. You can also choose not include any optical drive option in the event you already have an external optical drive of your own.

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 FireWire/USB 2.0 SuperDrive, or the desktop 18X 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.

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