Towards the end of last year I ripped open my Macbook Pro and installed an MCE Optibay mod along with a 2.5” drive to replace the MBP’s internal superdrive. My MBP had a 128gb SSD, and running Windows via Bootcamp or a VM combined with one or two disk hungry OSX applications meant that it simply wasn’t enough space anymore.
I looked at the price of a large replacement SSD, and simply couldn’t justify it for a laptop that was slightly over a year old, so the MCE mod made good financial sense.
Installing the MCE Optibay was pretty straight forward, but it was interesting how “wrong” it felt ripping the thing open and unplugging stuff. Maybe I’m simply not cut out to be a genius. With the second drive installed, I fired up the Mac and started enjoying the new disk space.. and noticing a couple of other things.
I quickly noticed the change in power usage. This was to be expected, and the MBP still gets good battery life, however for some reason it feels like the difference in power consumption is pretty large. When I glance at the battery meter sometimes it feels like I can watch it dropping right in front of me. Luckily battery life isn’t a big priority for me, but I was still surprised at how much quicker the battery “feels” like it drops now.
The second thing is something that took me a long time to notice. A long, frustrating time. Apparently it seems that the MCE mod causes VMware Fusion to have intermittent performance issues. I’m not talking about the VM being slightly sluggish here – it becomes completely unusable. It’s still alive, but with massive delays to keystrokes and mouse commands and basically everything. However sometimes it’ll boot up with no issues at all. For me, the VM was fine for the first few runs and so it took a while to realise that the performance had something to do with the MCE Optibay. A few searches later and it seems there are a few other people on the VMware forums having similar issues.
I started a thread on the forums, which shows that the folks at VMware are aware of the issue, and that they’re pretty keen to sort it out: VMware Fusion and MCE Optibay
One of the replies suggested to uninstall and reinstall VMware tools on the guest OS, and for now this seems to have addressed the issue for me. I still have more testing to do, but I’ve restarted the VM and the host many times over the past few weeks and have yet to experience the speed issues since the reinstall.
So, the MCE Optibay is a great modification – it’s easy to install, does exactly what you’d expect, and the fact that it comes with an external USB enclosure for your removed superdrive is a great touch. However, I have to say that in future I’d probably burn the extra cash and go for a single larger drive.
Tags: OSX, Apple