2012 MBP Optical Bay SATA Issues

Has anyone been able to get a SATA III storage device to work reliably on the Optical Bay SATA port on a 2012 MBP 2012 13", i5? If so, what drive, and how does it perform (ie. MB/s speed).

Like every good geek, the 1st thing I didn't with my new MBP was add Memory and storage, replacing the main drive with an SSD and the optical drive with a big drive (mechanical storage).

System Info says the optical bay is rated at 6 Gbs (SATA III). But, my experience is any SATA III 6Gps device you hook up to the Optical port crashes. I've only got the Apple SATA II (3 Gbs) harddrive to work. I've tried 3 different 6 Gbs devices: a Seagate Momentus XT 750 Hybrid, the Samsung 830 SSD, and the Vertex 4 SSD.... they all either crashed, had disk errors, failed to format, or caused a kernel panic. They say connect at 6 Gbs in Sys Info, but all had major issues. The 3 Gbs Apple drive says connected at 3 Gbs in System info. and runs fine.

This is Deja Vu with my 2009 13" MBP. Its rated 3 Gbs (SATA II), but my OWC 6G SSD only connects at 1.5 Gbs (half speed, ... after the fact OWC told me only the 3G models work on the 2009). But at least it doesn't crash the machine or drive. The difference was the SATA III Momentus XT connected at 3 Gbs and the SSD only 1.5 Gbs. Swapping drives didn't make a difference.

The really aggregating thing about my "upgrade" from 2009 to 2011 MBP was my Seagate Momentus XT 750 that used to work great at 3 Gps speed on the '09, now crashes and doesn't work at all at 6 Gps on the 2012 MBP. So I had "downgrade" to the 500 Gb Apple drive to get the optical port to work

On the bright side both Samsung 830 and OCZ V4 SSD's work great on the main drive (450 MB/s read) and it boots in 10 seconds. Yes 10 seconds! The optical drive SATA port is a major issue for everyone ( like me ) who buys MBPs because they can trip them out, this is a real nagging issue/obstacle. This is definitely a firmware issue that needs to be addressed by Apple. I'm hoping for a firmware update and that Apple isn't doing this intentionally. Until that time, my advice is, don't expect a 6 Gbs drive to work.

For anyone listening, I refuse to buy a Retina Mac (no matter how good the display is) with 1) Welded in memory, 2) glued in battery, and 3) no option for 2nd drive or HD upgrade. Please keep making MBP's with options!