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Would it be possible to slot more than one drive into a MacBook Pro's optical drive bay?

Obviously, no such product yet exists. (Would love to know if I'm wrong!) But when looking at optical-drive-bay-to-2.5" drive brackets like the OWC Data Doubler http://eshop.macsales.com/item/Other+World+Computing/DDAMBS0GB/ it's hard not to notice the empty space left over in the bracket even when a 2.5" drive is installed in the bracket.

It's hard not to imagine a similar bracket that would allow you to fit a 2.5" drive plus a mSATA drive simultaneously. Or perhaps two mSATA drives and no 2.5" drive.

Would the SATA connectors in a MBP (or any other laptop) allow for that? Or would each of the SATA channels on the MBP's logic board only support a single device each? Again, I'm just asking if such a product would be feasible or if running two drives off of a single MBP SATA connector would be a total non-starter.

Note: if this possibility interests anybody, it's worth noting that certain laptops like the ThinkPad W520 do make this kind of thing possible - the W520 has 1 SATA bay + 1 built-in mSATA connector + 1 optical SATA bay.

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  • I was just going to recommend you get a Thinkpad instead until I got to the end. Better build quality, better price, and they make fine Hackintosh if you insist on running OS X. As far as your question, since it's entirely theoretical given that there is no such product, I'm not sure how much info is available on this, but I don't think it's a bad question. Maybe somebody will know.
    – Shinrai
    Commented Dec 7, 2011 at 22:13
  • It's been a couple years since I messed around with Hackintoshes, but in my experience several years ago the hassle was enough to negate much of the benefits.
    – John Rose
    Commented Dec 7, 2011 at 22:51

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With the 17" macbook pro, you can convert the express card slot to accept another hard drive.

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Forgot I asked this question. I did receive an answer from OWC's (creator of Data Doubler) tech support:

Thank you for your reply. It is definitely a nice idea. Unfortunately, the internal SATA bus on the MBP does not support port multiplication, so this would not work.

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