SSD in optical drive

Well, you are going to face two different issues here:

• Moving the HD to the optical drive port will loose crash guard protection as only the HD port has it
• Your systems optical SATA port has a known issue running at SATA III (6.0 Gb/s)

OK, so what to do??

I would recommend either going with a larger SSD (1 or 2 TB) or going with a hybrid HD (SSHD) replacing the HD and calling it a day. We don't try to setup dual drives in this series as its just not worth the hassles.

Here's a bit more on the optical carrier issue: OWC Data Doubler. It makes no difference who's you go with as the problem is within the logic board.

As for SSD any SATA III (6.0 Gb/s) drive will work here for the swap out. We have gone with Samsung 850 EVO's as our standard as they have a good warranty and are a bit faster than most of the others, but they are more expensive than the others.

As for a hybrid drives: Seagate, Western Digital & Toshiba all make 2.5" SSHD drives. We use Seagate SSHD with 32 GB of flash as our standard. We focused on the Seagate drive as it is backwards compatible with SATA I & SATA II systems unlike the other drives.

Hope this answered your questions! Good Luck!