Chosen Solution
I’ve got the 500gb ssd arrived and just waiting on the rest of the bits to arrive but I’m wondering whether it’s worth removing the optical drive and replacing with the original mechanical hard drive if I’m fitting the 500gb ssd where the original drive was located? Or is it worth doing the conversion and when I can adding the 2nd hard with another ssd?
What made sense years ago, really doesn’t make sense today. I don’t recommend switching out the optical drive for a second drive. The first issue is the optical bay does not offer crash guard protection so placing a HDD into the optical bay puts the data on the HDD at risk. While one might think placing a SSD in the optical bay making it the boot drive, the systems firmware in this series expects an optical drive and shuts down the power so you can encounter corruption of the drive. So it’s best not doing it. The last point is the cost of two 512 SSD’s is more than getting a single 1TB drive and to add to it the SATA ports are serially connected to the PCH logic so you don’t get the dual I/O some people wish for that used the full bandwidth of each connected drive. For reference this is one of the few drives that offers support for the older SATA systems Samsung 860 EVO 2.5” SSD. Note the Interface line SATA 6 Gbps Interface, compatible with SATA 3 Gbps & 1.5 Gbps interfaces. Make sure your SSD spec sheet clearly states SATA II (3.0 Gb/s) support like Samsung does here.
