02-27-2010, 10:32 AM

Hi,

Is there a step by step guide somewhere to show how I can put a 2nd drive which would be a small SSD drive to boot only for bootcamp and OSX?

I have a late 2009 macbook pro unibody 15" with 2.8 gigz, 4gb DDR3 and 500GB HD

I want to use the MCE Optibay which is a bracket for mounting a HD in the optical drive location. I want to put the SSD as my primary boot up drive for both windows and osx and use the 500GB as storage mainly. I am thinking about the Intel X-25 80GB but not sure if that will be enough for both OS.

02-27-2010, 03:29 PM

I'm thinking that you should be able to hold down the "OPTION" key upon hearing the POST chime and select the SSD to boot from. As long as the SSD contains a bootable operating system (Leopard, Snow Leopard) it should work.

Putting a SSD in an OptiBay carrier replaces the SuperDrive which is also used to boot from. (DVD) As far as getting the SSD to boot automatically, you may be able to use the EFI boot selection capability of rEFIt to do it. I don't know for sure if it will work or not. You would have to try it to find out. Since rEFIt is free, that's easy enough to do.

Here's the download LINK to rEFIt.

Regards.

02-27-2010, 10:14 PM

Just wanted to let you know I've done this upgrade - second SSD drive with OS on it (as well as aliases to the ~/User/Library which also gets hit with a lot of i/o). Results are amazing - apps open as if they're just minimized.

Just use startup disk in preferences to set it as the new startup disk.