Malibal Hard Drive Options

For a while now I've held the belief that in today's world, you really don't need an optical drive. And, any time you do, a USB one will be just fine. So looking at Malibal's P150EM-SE offerings, I noticed something funny...

To start off, these are the default selections and prices of both the hard drive and optical bay components:

Spoiler

My plan, since I am looking to purchase a laptop near the end of May or early June, is to get a 750GB hybrid drive and then a large (I'm thinking 1TB, but this thread is about Malibal's 750GB offerings) drive just for storage. So with that in mind, if you take a look at the pricing on 750GB drives, you notice that they are different depending on which bay you have them installed to. With no other upgrades, here is both a 750GB hybrid and regular HDD, one installed in the hard drive bay and the other where the optical drive would traditionally go:

Spoiler

As you can see, it is actually cheaper to have the hybrid drive installed in the optical drive's bay. My question is this: why? A hard drive in either place gets the same type of connection and therefore performance, correct? If that is not the case, I'd like to know, since I am planning on doing this myself in about a month.

tl;dr - Is there any difference between hard drives installed in the hard drive bay(s) and the optical drive bay?

 

I'm pretty sure, at least in the P150HM (not sure about EM) that the optical drive bay only has SATAII whereas the hard drive bay is SATAIII. However, I'm certain the price difference is just an oversight on Malibal's part. You can just order the cheaper variant and switch the hard drives if you want to.

 

I have a feeling that the higher price is indicative of them not wanting to lose money if someone was to only swap out the original 500gb drive. The ODD bay slot is probably closer to the true price because they don't have to worry about what to do with many extra 500gb HDDs floating around.

 

I suppose. $40-50 to install a hard drive seems rather steep to me though. I need to read up on the warranties, but popping open the back to change them around shouldn't void anything, correct? Isn't that sort of Clevo's model, being highly upgradable and easily modified?

 

More than possible. Easily done and no warranties broken. It's just that Windows will be installed on your primary drive instead of the one in the ODD bay. Maybe chat to them and ask if they can do a switch for you?

 

If I pay for the OS, isn't there an option usually to get the install disk so you can reinstall Windows yourself? It's actually cheapest to buy the laptop with no RAM or hard drive(s), and then just put that stuff in yourself. I would stray away from purchasing much else separately though, as I'm not a trained technician or anything so I wouldn't want to screw myself over with poor thermal paste application or something like that.

 

All the sellers AFAIK will give you an install disk.

I'm not sure though if any sellers barring mythlogic/malibal will sell a laptop without a hard drive/RAM (at least Sager resellers won't).

 

It appears to be possible.