Replacing a bad optical drive with a HDD

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My son gave me a MacBook Pro 3,1 that he said had become unusable. I replaced the HDD with a 480 GB SSD and upgraded the RAM from 2GB to 6GB. The optical drive was not working and I wanted to replace it with a HDD. Problem: the optical drive used a PATA connection and large PATA drives are essentially non-existent. The iFixit adapter accepting a SATA drive was a perfect fit.

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Opening the laptop was routine. The only tedious part was moving mounting hardware from the optical drive to the adapter. Everything fit perfectly! I put in a 1TB HDD and then used the OS X (El Capitan) terminal to quickly combine the SSD and HDD into a 1.48 TB Fusion Drive. A restoration from the Time Machine completed the transformation. While not a screamer with a decade old processor and FSB and RAM typical of that era, the resulting laptop performs better than new with over 15 times the storage capacity.

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Check the required interfaces before starting. While specs always include the capacities or speeds, they often omit the interfaces and the default choices change over time.