Optibay for the Macbook pro (Early 2011) 15" 2.2Ghz I7

Was bored on Sunday, so made this plan for a minor upgrade... which I seem to find myself doing every year around this time (When winter starts) a complete overhaul of my current setup, which is a Dual boot, Macosx 10.6.3/winxpsp3 set up, running a 2009 macbookpro 13" for gaming (Portal 2, Alien Swarm, Company of Heroes, Crysis2, etc.) and personal development with iPhone using xCode/Photoshop CS5/Blender, which runs a Core 2 Duo 2.26Ghz with 4 Gigs of RAM, and a NVIDIA GeForce 9400M GPU with 256MB of dedicated video memory...

Which is pretty good, but then again it's not good enough to play Crysis 2 on a decent resolution, and I needed this fixed...wanted this fixed. So what started out as a bit of a browse on the apple store, which in turn a browse on ebay/amazon/alternative mac reseller stores, which in turn an entire evening reading hardware reviews and watching unboxing videos on youtube, in turn a purchase of a 2011 Macbook Pro 15" 2.2 ghz model New for $2169.99 from a reseller with a warehouse in Sydney to ship from.

After a few beers, I successfully pushed the guilt and logical/rational thinking from my head that I don't need it and it's a waste of time and money, and pushed on, researching SSD's and further upgrades for the beast I'd found myself buying.

I learnt of a Optibay, a add on to use your redundant optical Bay in the MBP, for a second HD spot where my 750GB HD could reside, while the Intel 120GB SSD would take the main spot and be used for the booting of the operating system and running of mission critical applications like Call of Duty: MW 2 and xCode4. After reading the 'how-to guides' for performing this addition, I set out the following layout for my new setup, to for perhaps at least 12 months provide me with an edge over my peers and friends, and allow me some bragging opportunity at LANs, of my grunty SSD and reasonably powerful macbook pro.

Partitions

HD (700GB) (Optibay, replaces the Optical Disc).
NTFS 100GB
FAT32 100GB
MAC FS 500GB

HD (100GB) (Replaces the 750GB from MBP 15") Intel 120
FAT32 32GB BOOTCAMP + WINDOWS XPSP3
Mac FS 68GB MACOSX 10.6.3

Directory Structure of SSD:

MAC FS
- MACOSX
- Portal 2
- CS:S
- XCODE 4
- Development Folder (Includes Build Directories).
- iTunes.
- Blender
- Firefox
- Photoshop FAT32:
- Windows
- Crysis 2
- Dark Space 2
- Alien Swarm

Directory Structure of HD

NTFS
- Windows Installs.

FAT32
- Files to r/w between OS'

MAC FS
- Movies
- Videos
- Installers
- XCode Installs
- Game Installs
- Downloads
- Pictures
- Documents




Parts
1. (Early 2011) Macbook Pro 15” I7 2.2 Quad Core, AMD Radeon Uber Card. New $2169.00 AUD Free Delivery. EBay (Sydney Supplier)
2. Opti-bay (Fenzi Brand) $20.00 Free Delivery (Hong Kong).
3. SSD (Intel 320) 120GB, $300.00, Free Delivery iibuy.com.au.

Sites for reference to use the Optical Drive as a secondary 2.5” HD slot:
http://osxdaily.com/2010/05/19/install-an-ssd-into-the-optical-drive-slot-on-a-macbook-pro
http://lifehacker.com/5541774/how-to-install-a-solid+state-drive-in-your-macbook
http://www.mactalk.com.au/24/98605-installing-ssd-optibay.html

I now wait for the goods to arrive, and look forward to a successful custom set up of my new Macbook Pro. More posts to come