Hackability of new MacBook Pro's

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Hackability of new MacBook Pro's

There are two hardware changes (from the PowerBooks) that make me think of some hackabilities for the MacBook Pro's. . .

The first factor is the change to the SATA (serial) harddrive interface. Meaning you can have multiple harddrives in serial configuration. In a notebook you could say "so what, there's no room for more than one drive". Except what about the 1" harddrives? Are any of those configed in the SATA format? If so, you might be able to fit four in the space of a standard 2.5" x 9mm HD space(?).

The second factor is the new UltraSlimline size of the optical drive, ostensibly used to make this machine thinner than the PowerBooks. Is the space use maximized? or is there a little more airflow around this thing? (Read "hack-space".)

Mutant_Pie

(BTW when they introduce the HiDefBlueRay CD Burners into the MacBook Pro Line, I think that it will be time for me to upgrade. . . ah computer lust 2007, here I come!)

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. . . correction. . .

I meant to write DVD burners, but you knew what I meant. . .

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Re: Hackability of new MacBook Pro's

The second factor is the new UltraSlimline size of the optical drive, ostensibly used to make this machine thinner than the PowerBooks. Is the space use maximized? or is there a little more airflow around this thing? (Read "hack-space".)

well... considering that the new SuperDrive is a downgrade from the ones in the last revision... from 8X DL DVD±R to 4 X SL DVD±R. The reason for the downgrade is that they couldn't fit that drive in the space they designed... so they used the thinner SL drive. If they had any space left, I'm sure they would have used the DL drive... (how much thicker could it be?). I doubt there is any space there.

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Re: Hackability of new MacBook Pro's

SATA (serial) harddrive interface. Meaning you can have multiple harddrives ... what about the 1" harddrives? ... you might be able to fit four in the space of a standard 2.5" x 9mm HD space(?)

But the price per gig is going to suck, and likely the speed too. Don't really see the point. Replacing the optical with a second SATA drive and RAIDing them might be more viable.

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whats the likely hood that th

whats the likely hood that the motherboard has multiplw hdd capability? let alone RAID. are their any RAID pcmcia cards out yet?

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OS X can set up a RAID from t

Wikipedia had this to say on multiple drives:

Serial ATA drops the master/slave shared bus of PATA, giving each device a dedicated cable and dedicated bandwidth.

So no. On the other hand...

Another controller could be added into a controller ASIC at little cost beyond the addition of the extra seven signal lines and PCB space for the cable header.

Future hack?

There must be Cardbus SATA cards around, and Disk Utility could do the RAIDing.

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