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Comment by thomasgerbe | Hacker News Reader

Great news.

Now if only they just did away with the optical drives on MBP's. I have used mine about... twice in three years since owning my current laptop.

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You can put another HD (or SSD) in your optical bay:

http://www.mcetech.com/optibay/

Cheap eBay brackets are ~$20 and accomplish the same thing.

There are a couple of caveats--here's everything you need to know: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2493938

How is the battery life?

Seems unchanged for me (I added an SSD, so the existing 7200 RPM HD became a rarely-used media drive).

I see ~5.5 hours real-world use on a 15" MBP, and my development environment includes a virtualized XP install.

I saw some improvement. No hard data though.

Great summary. Last year I did the same (MBP2010) and I outlined all the steps here:

http://forums.macrumors.com/showpost.php?p=10814085&post...

I used the OWC disk-doubler to replace the optical drive in my MBP and love it. The only "gotcha" that I ran into was trying to install from the wrong OS X disk. Apparently MPB needs the version it came with or newer to function.

Absolutely, I'd gladly trade this optical drive, which I've used twice in a year, for two more USB ports. Hard to believe that my $2200 MBP has only two USB ports, which constrains me daily, and my $500 Toshiba has four.

If Airs can do without the drive, there's no reason MBPs can't as well. They're running the same OS after all.

Agree. I hear people on MacRumors saying the professional laptop should have the most features (thus, the optical drive) but for me, more USB ports and potentially a second HDD would do more for my day-to-day activities than an optical drive.

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