Macbook function okay without optical drive?

[turbolegs]

So my optical drive in my 2005 macbook finally died. I never use it and i'm fairly certain its one of the heaviest components inside the computer. I was thinking of removing it and just leaving the bay empty but I don't know if this is possible, or would adversely affect the computers performance. Any ideas?

[CRTGAMER]

The Laptop will work without the optical drive installed. The drive does not weigh that much, maybe not worth the risk damaging something when popping the shells off to get access?

[turbolegs]

Okay great, I think i'll take it out anyway, purely because I have to clean my fan. If you know of a less drastic way of doing this, i'm all ears!

[Yukima]

You could buy a kit that would allow you to install a solid state drive (SSD) into the optical bay. If you use the SSD as your boot drive and use your regular hard drive as data/media storage, the Macbook will run your apps much faster, especially if they're read/write intensive.

I haven't tried this myself (since I still use the superdrive on my Mac often) but others have recommended the Optibay drive kit by MCE (http://www.mcetech.com/optibay/). They have one for non-unibody Macbooks (pre-2009).

[ZenErik]

I wouldn't just remove it. I would replace it with another optical drive or with a caddy + a second hard drive. The weight will be a bit off with just NOTHING there.

[Ziggy]

I wouldn't leave it empty just so dust wouldn't get in.