OT: Upgrading a laptop

[Fishy]

Probably more out of boredom than any sort of need, I swapped out the HD on my laptop for an SSD and then put the HD in the optical drive bay.

I'd like to find an external enclosure with USB for the disk drive - anyone have a preferred source for such things? The drive is a Super Drive from a current 15" MacBook Pro.

I don't think I ever used the drive, but now that I've taken it out, I will no doubt have an urgent need to use in in the immediate future.

 

[jleves]

newegg.com

 

[WhereistheDove?]

newegg.com

Have to agree here. Everyone I know who builds or works on their own computers uses newegg. I've probably shopped there 10 times and never had a bad experience. Very fast shipping also.

 

[UCHuskies08]

Lots of free shipping there as well. New egg ftw.

 

[Fishy]

Egad.

You could spend some money there.

I spent three seconds there and thought about starting to build another PC.

I have some pieces and parts left over if anyone needs em...

A mounting bracket and connectors for mounting an SSD to a PC chassis. An unused copy of Norton's Ghost that came with the Samsung SSD. Two 2GB of pc3-8500 RAM and two 2Gb of pcs-10600 RAM. (Fits a 2010 MacBook Pro and a 2011 Mac Mini.)

 

[HuskyHawk]

Newegg is my first choice as well, but sometimes, for certain brands, tiger direct can beat their price.

 

[jleves]

zipzoomfly.com (if it's still around) I've used in the past too. Good prices, quick shipping.

 

[tentoes4rings]

Try cooler express.com too for enclosures and drives, have had good luck with them.

 

[tentoes4rings]

Nevermind, think they got gobbled up by newegg. Try newegg, lol.

 

[B1GEast]

Newegg is unbeatable, if you have the fortitude, you can get great deals on recertified products. Some people like tigerdirect, but I always end up at newegg.

 

[zls44]

Another big Newegg fan here. They've branched out a bit beyond electronics, but you can't go wrong with their electronic deals.

I actually had a WD 120 GB from 2006 whose USB port snapped off last week. I broke the thing open and was able to get it back by mounting it into an enclosure I had lying around collecting dust. For all the lights/bells/whistles, any external HD is the exact same thing as what you'd buy online to mount inside a PC. Rip of the case and you can plug it into any enclosure.

Unless you get one of the physically smaller drives for weight/convenience, an enclosure is the way to go for extra space. The enclosure shouldn't run you more than $50, and you can swap the HD out for another one if you want. You plug in three things, all of which are wildly different & only can go in the plug one way. It's foolproof, takes 30 seconds to assemble, and will probably save you a lot of cheese.

If you'll excuse me, I have to go back to figuring out how I have a girlfriend after typing that.

 

[Fishy]

I think you misunderstand. I now have two hard drives in the laptop.

The OEM drive is a 500GB drive that spins at 5400 - it's the bottleneck in a system with a Core i7, etc. I removed that in favor of a Samsung SSD drive. Clean install of Lion and the thing just smokes along. It's just a 128GB drive, though. So for storage, I took out the disk drive, put the original HD into a bracket and installed it in place of the disk drive.

I was looking for a case to put the removed optical drive in so I'd have it if I ever had to load a disk. I found one on some Chinese import site for about $6.

I have no idea how you have a girlfriend either.