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The connector on my Seagate 4TB Plus Fast portable drive has gotten very flaky, and I need more onboard storage on my MacBook Pro 13" mid-2012. Is there any reason why I can't take one of the two 2TB drives in the Seagate and install it in the optical bay with one of your sleds?
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Getting info on this drive seems to be tough. It appears to be an NTFS drive. While it can be used as an external on a Mac there are issues with it as an internal drive. Possibly the new Apple formatting due out with High Sierra will be able to handle it. @danj knows more about this than I do, so let's see if he has a better answer.
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@mayer - Nothing special with standard platter drives. You'll still need to go GUID and Mac OS Extended (Journaled).
I've been playing with the new file system on a 2.5" Samsung 1 TB SATA drive in a iMac and a MacBook Retina with a PCIe NVMe drive.
I'm starting to think you don't really want to use it on a SATA drive, just the PCIe NVMe drives. The issue is queuing the SATA drive can't handle the queue depth the new APFS wants to use.
Thanks, Mayer.
Dan did indeed have some helpful comments.
Harold
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I would recommend you see if you can get the USB port replaced Vs scraping the drive just to recover the one 2 TB drive. Remember! Once you break the RAID 0 pair the other drives data is lost!
So first off I have not opened this drive. As such we just don't know how the drives are connected together and if they have a SATA interface.
So for argument-sake lets say the drive its self is a standard 2.5" drive so what Seagate drive would that be?? Here's the most probable candidate: 2.5" SATA Hard Drive #STBD2000102. We can see the height of this drive is 9.5mm across all of the drives. So from a size perspective the drive would fit your system.
BUT we still have a problem here! This drive is not workable in many of the 13" MacBook Pro's.
If we review the OWC - Data Doubler sheet we can see the 2012 13" MacBook Pro (MacBookPro9,1) has a compatibility note at the bottom that SATA III (6.0 Gb/s) drives have issues within the optical bay. This is not OWC failing but Apples! As they mis-clock the PCH chip.
While the Seagate we've assumed is the one being used in your external drive, has auto SATA port sense there is no means to lock it down to the slower SATA II (3.0 Gb/s) speed your MacBook Pro needs in the optical bay, so you do run the risk of data corruption. In addition, to that the optical drive carrier does not offer HD crash guard protection unlike the HD SATA port.
Again for argument-sake lets say you still want to give it a go. You would still need to reformat the drive to GUID and Mac OS Extended (Journaled). You really wouldn't want NTFS as you loose the meta information of the Mac file system.
Bottom Line
I think this is not worth the effort given the loss of you're external which is repairable!
In addition, this is not really the ideal drive. I would go with just replacing my current HD for either a SSHD like the Seagate FireCuda or if you can swing it go full out with a Samsung 850 EVO both offer 2 TB drives (leaving the optical bay alone)
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Dan,
Sorry for the late reply, and thanks for your detailed response. Checked our the FireCuda, and it looks like a good option. $120 Canadian.
A couple of notes:
• I checked my system profile and the model of my MBP is 9,2
• I have a small 256 SSD as my system drive and to keep things simple, I'd like to stay with that
• I've already decided to give up on the external media drive anyway, in favour of an internal. All data is backed up. Just looking to get some money back out of my investment in the 4TB two years ago.
Would any of that info change your advice?
Thanks again for the feedback.
Harold
Even if you’re giving up on the external RAID drive I would still fix it and then sell it.
Do you have any backup solution HD or internet based? I would strongly recommend you at least sign up for a backup service if your internet connection is fast and bi-directional, otherwise get a good HD solution. I have three RAID 5 (mirrored) drives which I rotate.
Sorry you’re still stuck here. Your systems optical drive port can only support a fixed SATA II 3.0 Gb/s drive. Most drives today are either fixed SATA III (6.0 Gb/s) or are auto sense which allow them to run at SATA II or SATA III. These auto drives need a steady input to run correctly, here is where you’ll have the problem as your systems clocking is off so the drive can’t latch into the correct speed.
We tried the dual drive approach with our MacBook Pro’s the field & sales force use (over 300 MacBook Pro’s) it was a disaster! It was not a reliable option for us and we stopped trying and went with the SSHD solution and then went to SSD’s 1 & 2 TB drive’s replacing the primary HD and leaving the optical drives alone. Best move we made! Our system failure rate dropped back down.
I would recommend you do the same go with the SSHD or if you can swing it get a larger SSD and leave the optical drive alone!
Dan,
Sorry for a late reply again. And thanks again for useful advice. I'm leaning to replacing the drive as you suggest. Don't want to borrow any problems, especially with an older MBP. Again, thanks for the help.
H.
Dan,
Sorry to bother you yet again. Before following your advice on the FireCuda 2TB 5400, I wanted to ask if, in your opinion, this drive would be fast enough to handle 4k footage from my Panasonic G85. I don't do a lot of video editing, and no fancy compositing, but I do put footage together from time to time.
Also, on your question about backup, yes, I have a separate external drive. But I'm planning to look into cloud backup schemes as well.
Thanks again for your help.
Regards,
Harold
The drive is a not likely to be the bottleneck in your video editing.
More often its the lack of RAM and the limits of the CPU.
While you might have a bit of lag if you don't maintain your drive (defragment) it should be fine for small home projects.
If you really want speed you'll need to go with an SSD and it will need to be one of the bigger units to have enough storage for the vids.
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Seagate Backup Fast 4 TB (RAID 0) specs
by Dan