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Late 2011 model, A1278 / 2.4 GHz i5 or 2.8 GHz i7 processor.

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What is supposed to go into this empty spot?

I bought a 2011 Macbook Pro 13” second hand. Went to replace the battery and noticed an empty spot beside the battery. I’ve attached a picture. What is supposed to be there?

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Hi,

You seem to be missing the hard drive. Here is pic of what should be there.

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That’s what I thought should be there. What is the Solid State Drive? When I looked up the part, I found that it was called the Optical Drive. Either way, it turns on and runs, so is it running off the SSD?

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@Shannon - Alexander's picture is what his system looks like as he swapped out the optical drive for a SSD using a special frame Unibody Laptop Dual Drive following this guide Installing MacBook Pro 13" Unibody Late 2011 Dual Hard Drive

I would just put in the a replacement drive for the one that's missing in yours. Just like your car which can take different grades of gas, here we have two grades of drives Hard Disks (HDD) often called spinning rust VS the newer technology of solid state drives (SSD).

Most people now go with SSD's as they are more rugged for laptops which tend to get banged about MacBook and MacBook Pro (Non-Retina) SSD Upgrade Kit

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When you replace your hard drive, with an SSD, be sure to also replace the hard drive/IR cable with the wider one from the 2012 model. This cable failure may be why the original hard drive was removed:

MacBook Pro 13" Unibody Mid 2012 Hard Drive Cable Replacement

MacBook Pro 13" Unibody (Mid 2012) Hard Drive Cable

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@Shannon If you decide to install a hard drive or SSD back in the factory location, you should consider that the previous owner may have placed the current drive in the optical drive bay for a reason. I remember these years of this model having a design problem with them where the cable for the normal hard drive will fail. Maybe that happened and the previous owner decided not to put a cable in it, instead replacing the optical drive? Just something to keep in mind, if you decide to fill that empty bay and the drive doesn't work properly that is the first thing I would check.

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@armorben - Shannon's system was only missing the HDD, The other device is an optical drive. Alexander Hewe's image shows a dual drive setup which is not what Shannon encountered.

Most likely the drive was taken out as the owner was worried about what it had on it when they sold the system.

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@danj I apologize if I am mistaken, but looking at the image from the original post, that doesn't look like a normal optical drive to me. The normal Apple ones typically have some transparent plastic covering the drive internals and other ones I have come across typically don't have any cutouts in the bottom sheet metal. I can see four windows in the sheet metal that appear to have the mounting holes from a drive below them and the Toshiba sticker looks like it would be covering the bottom of the hard drive motor. It looks exactly like the bottom of the caddies we have in our shop once you have a drive installed.

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@armorben - Your cool! It's possible someone put in a second drive replacing the optical drive. Apple used a few different optical drive makers and some folks swapped out the Apple drive with a BluRay drives.

But, why only take one drive out then if there was a second? If it was me I would have taken both out if I had any data I didn't want anyone to get their hands on.

The empty space is where a HDD (or SSD) would be placed. Using the optical drive bay for the boot drive is not recommended as only the HD bay offers crash guard protection for spinning rust drives (HDD's) SSD's don't need crash guard so they can be used in either bay.

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Shannon will be eternally grateful.
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