When the MacBook Air was first drawn from a meme-inspiring manila envelope, we gasped. "It's so, so, so thin!" we shouted, like Marty McFly meeting his teenage mother. Then we found out that there was no optical drive inside and the hand-wringing began. "How will we install AOL?" cried the blogging world.
A year later and nobody cares. DVD-free netbooks are flying off the shelves and the CD-ROM hasn't gotten any more relevant. Hell, I have a new MacBook and I don't want the SuperDrive in there. I never use it and it makes an annoying groan every time the computer wakes up.
MCE comes to the rescue. Using its kit you can replace your optical drive with a second hard drive of up to 500GB. It's essentially a sled which fits into the optical drive bay and holds a standard 2.5" hard drive. And your old drive? MCE will sell you an enclosure for that so you can have it around for those rare times when you need to reinstall AOL. The new drive hooks into the SATA connector and should just show up upon reboot.
This is a fantastic idea, if a little expensive. The 500GB kit will cost $250 if you install it yourself. Add an extra $100 if you want MCE to do it for you. After opening up my MacBook to add RAM, I saw how easy it is to access the SuperDrive. I'm very, very tempted to try this out.
Product page [MCE via Apple Insider]
