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I’m planning to replace my optical drive in my mid 2012 MacBook Pro 13inch with an SSD. Both optical and main bay are capable of 6gb (SATA III), with main bay currently at 3gb negotiated and optical and 1.5gb negotiated. Would I be ok to put the SSD straight into the optical drive and boot off it and have my current HDD remain where it is and be a secondary storage? Any advice would be appreciated. Will I notice any speed difference with the SSD being in optical? I’m worried about the HDD not having motion sensor if I put it in the optical bay. Another alternative is getting two SSDs and running striped RAID.
Well, you are going to face two different issues here: Moving the HD to the optical drive port will loose crash guard protection as only the HD port has itYour systems optical SATA port has a known issue running at SATA III (6.0 Gb/s) OK, so what to do?? I would recommend either going with a larger SSD (1 or 2 TB) or going with a hybrid HD (SSHD) replacing the HD and calling it a day. We don’t try to setup dual drives in this series as its just not worth the hassles. Here’s a bit more on the optical carrier issue: OWC Data Doubler. It makes no difference who’s you go with as the problem is within the logic board. As for SSD any SATA III (6.0 Gb/s) drive will work here for the swap out. We have gone with Samsung 850 EVO’s as our standard as they have a good warranty and are a bit faster than most of the others, but they are more expensive than the others. As for a hybrid drives: Seagate, Western Digital & Toshiba all make 2.5" SSHD drives. We use Seagate SSHD with 32 GB of flash as our standard. We focused on the Seagate drive as it is backwards compatible with SATA I & SATA II systems unlike the other drives. Hope this answered your questions! Good Luck!
