MCE’s OptiBay hard drive upgrade is among the more unique modifications one can make to their MacBook, MacBook Pro, or PowerBook G4. The upgrade makes use of the space occupied by the optical drive to add a second hard drive for some major portable storage. Blogger Eric Cheng has added a second 160GB drive to his MacBook Pro, and beyond that, created a striped RAID O array from the two drives. The benchmarks are quite impressive, with some significant performance gains. The upgrade isn’t all roses, as Eric thinks it possibly adds to the heat put off by the MBP, and battery life is reduced 10-15%, but depending on what you use your notebook for, it’s an intriguing option.

Filed under: Miscellaneous