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Apple's line of laptops for professional and power users. To date, the MacBook Pro line includes 13, 14, 15, 16, and 17-inch variants, with major revisions defined by Pre-unibody(Original), unibody, Retina display, Touch Bar, and SOC (system-on-a-chip) designs.

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Does the HDD still spin when putting it into a HDD caddy?

Hi,

I am thinking about upgrading my Macbook Pro with an SSD and replace the internal CD/DVD optical Superdrive with an HDD caddy in which I want to put the old 2.5" HDD into.

Now I did this before with my Thinkpad, however on Thinkpads, you can swap the ultrabay drive easily without opening the device. Just Plug in and out.

What I do not like is that the drive is spinning in idle mode, although I am not accessing it. When the fan is off I can hear the HDD and thats why I am only inserting the HDD caddy when I need it to copy some stuff over from the SSD.

Since plugging off won't work for an unibody Macbook , I wanted to ask if anyone has experience with HDD caddies in their MacBooks.

Does the drive shut off in idle? Or does it constantly spin?

Thanks in advance

Answered! View the answer I have this problem too

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Let me answer your direct question first: your HD will react the same in either SATA port (not PATA optical drive'd systems). The real trick in controlling the HD spinning up is the energy settings.

We use to setup our MacBook Pro's with the dual drive setup as you have outlined. But we discovered Apple's HD crash avoidance services only worked on the HD's SATA port. So you put your HD at risk moving it over to the optical drives location (it doesn't take much to crash your drive). In addition, some systems won't support SATA lll (6.0 Gb/s) throughput even-though the HD SATA port is SATA lll.

Because of these issues we switched to SSHD drives instead. We have quite a few in the field with great success, more so than we got with the dual drive setups.

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Alright, but I can hear my hd when it idles . I believe a system hd never shuts off ? Just curious if I can hear it when it's in the optibay and the Fan is off

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You need to alter the energy settings to spin down the HD

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