MCE offers 1TB HDD solution for 17-in MacBook Pro

MCE Technologies on Friday said it will begin shipping a 1TB internal hard drive solution for the Apple's MacBook Pro 17-inch. The solution, which installs two half-terabyte drives and affects battery performance a bit, consists of the new MCE OptiBay SATA 500GB Optical Bay Hard Drive and an MCE MobileStor 500GB Internal SATA Hard Drive. The new MCE OptiBay SATA 500GB Optical Bay Hard Drive replaces the internal SuperDrive of the MacBook Pro 17-inch with a 500GB internal hard drive; however, the company provides a slim, portable enclosure for the internal SuperDrive, effectively converting it into a portable, bus-powered, bootable, external USB 2.0 SuperDrive able to load software, play DVDs, and burn media.

The MCE MobileStor 500GB Internal SATA Hard Drive replaces the original 2.5-inch SATA hard drive inside the MacBook Pro 17-inch and a bus-powered, portable external enclosure is provided for the original hard drive.

The MCE 1TB Internal Hard Drive Solution for the MacBook Pro 17-inch is priced at $800 and will begin shipping May 16.

“MCE is pleased to be able to offer an unprecedented 1 terabyte of high performance internal hard disk storage for the MacBook Pro 17-inch," stated Arnold Ramirez, president of MCE. “Mobile video editors, digital photographers, digital DJ’s, and more will no longer need to lug around external hard drives to have high speed access to all their data.”

The MCE OptiBay SATA 500GB Optical Bay Hard Drive and the MCE MobileStor 500GB Internal SATA Hard Drive each utilize matched 500GB 2.5-inch SATA hard drives spinning at 5400RPM for a combined capacity of 1TB. All initialization, partitioning, and RAID setup is managed by Apple’s Disk Utility program. In its simplest configuration, the drives can be set up as individual volumes of 500GB each.

Using more advanced configurations users can create high-performance RAID 0 (striped) or RAID 1 (mirrored) volumes or combine the drives so that they appear to the system as a single 1TB hard drive. The MCE OptiBay SATA 500GB Optical Bay Hard Drive can also be setup for use as the Time Machine target drive, offering a way to perform automatic backups without the need to remember to plug in an external device.

Like the internal hard drive, the OptiBay SATA 500GB Hard Drive responds to S.M.A.R.T. status monitoring by the Mac OS to help forewarn of impending disk failure. MCE says the battery life of the laptop is typically affected by only 10 to 15 percent as power consumption and current draw fall below that of the original optical drive and is helped even further by advanced power management built into each OptiBay drive.

The MCE OptiBay SATA 500GB Optical Bay Hard Drive including enclosure is $450; it is only available for the 17-inch MacBook Pro, while a 320GB ($350) is available for the MacBook or 15-inch MacBook Pro. The OptiBay Hard Drive comes with a three-year warranty.

Filed under: peripherals, upgrades/storage
Other story tags: MacBook Pro, hard drive, USB SuperDrive