Making a Superdrive External

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Level 1

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Making a Superdrive External

I am going to buy a new hard drive for my macbook (the original), but in doing so I will lose the ability to use cd's. So I want to convert my superdrive to an external cd drive. Has anyone attempted this successfully? If so, would you please recommend some enclosures that fit the superdrive? And please don't warn me about losing the ability to use apple's dvd player; I am already aware.

Thanks for your help.

Macbook, Mac OS X (10.5.7)

Posted on Sep 16, 2010 6:39 PM

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Answer 1

First Magus

Level 7

21,299 points

Sep 16, 2010 6:42 PM in response to Thesmug1

Why will you lose use of the superdrive by swapping out your hard drive?

Mort

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Answer 2

Sep 17, 2010 12:32 AM in response to Thesmug1

Yeah, I'm with First Magus. I don't get it. How does replacing a hard drive make you lose your super drive? Are you attempting to put two hard drives in your machine?

As for your question: I see no reason why it wouldn't work, but the performance of the internal drives is shocking when they are in the machine, so I can only imagine them being worse in an external enclosure.

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Answer 3

Nov 15, 2010 10:10 PM in response to Thesmug1

My buddy used an internal mount to replace his optical bay with one from mcetech.com (Optibay) and it came with a functional enclosure to put the Super Drive in.
http://store.mcetech.com/Merchant2/merchant.mvc?Screen=PROD&ProductCode=OBSXGB-UNB&CategoryCode=STORHDOPTIBAY

I thought I'd save money and buy this enclosure:
http://newmodeus.com/shop/index.php?mainpage=product_info&productsid=259&zenid=7a91eadf0fbc21e0e31a414c51cd3899

And then get a $15 USB to SATA enclosure of amazon for the DVD drive. I've had to return two of the enclosures now because one wasn't the proper SATA connector, the other was DOA. Now I'm wondering if being frugal was worth the trouble. The optical bay enclosure was perfect thought. Make sure you ask them which specific model you should get for your specific generation of MacBook though.

I now have an HDD and SSD in my mid-year 2010 Unibody MacBook Pro and couldn't be happier. The sucker really sings with the apps and OS on the SSD and my larger media on the HDD.

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Answer 4

Feb 13, 2011 10:32 AM in response to matt68000

matt, I just did the same thing over Xmas and the SSD definitely whirrs away like made and I love it. When I ordered the Optibay they sent me a free enclosure for the superdrive, usb 2.0, which works great but I haven't really touched it since I made the USB bootable OSX install disk; see link below.
http://www.maciverse.com/install-boot-os-x-leopard-from-a-usb-flash-drive.html

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