Can I put a 1TB HDD in my optical Bay

Question

I have a 2011 17" Macbook pro with a 1TB HDD installed and running the latest OSX. I am looking at installing a SSD in the original HD bay for my OS and Programs and moving the 1TB drive to the optical bay. My current HDD location says it has a link speed of 6gb and negotiated link speed of 3gb and the optical drive says it has a link speed of 6 gb with a negotiated speed of 1.5gb. So my question is twofold. 1. Will my current drive work correctly in the optical drive space and 2. Can I put a 1TB in there? Most of the adapters specify up to 500gb.

Thanks

Answer 1

Yes. You can put a 1TB drive in there.

The port that your optical drive connects to is a standard SATA III port. This is why you are seeing that it supports 6Gb/s. The "negotiated" speed is the speed at which the device will communicate. A SATA I drive has a transfer rate of 1.5Gb/s. So, even though SATA III can go 6Gb/s, a SATA I can't go any faster.

A SATA III port is backward compatible with SATA II and SATA I. That being said, a SATA port is a SATA port - it doesn't care if you are attaching a spinning hard disk, an optical disk or an SSD. SATA supports 48-bit LBA (Logical Block Addressing) which means your drive can be up to 128 PB (Peta Bytes) or 128,000 1TB drives. So, there is no limitation from a hardware standpoint.

I have personally [used this model optical bay drive caddy][3] with a 1TB drive with no problems. The specs say "up to 500GB" but I suspect that since this product has been out for such a long time, they just never bothered to update the marketing material.

Answer 2

Try MacSales.com and use My Upgrades. Note that your year model has three different versions.

1. I did attempt to guess on your specific version. You can find your specific version under About This Mac from the Apple menu.

2. I didn't gleam the specific answers to your questions, however it seems plausible. I'd call them to confirm before ordering.