I just purchased a 120GB SSD for my laptop which only has one drive slot so I had to remove the previous hard drive and make it into an external one using an enclosure. However, this made my work a bit messy since I had to carry around said external hard drive everywhere. I heard from a friend that I can just remove my optical disk drive and swap in my hard drive since I almost never use the optical drive on my laptop. Now my question is, if the procedure was done would I still need to install drivers for the drive to work properly or will it be a plug and play situation?
It would more than likely be a plug and play situation, unless the drive comes with optional drivers. You might want to install those if that's the case. Your computer should simply recognize the drive, SSD or HDD, and then you'll be good to go, assuming it fits in your machine properly.
Very interesting question. Please come back and tell how it went if you do swap out your optical drive for the hard drive. I would think the Operating System that you're using would be a big factor.
From what I know I don't think you'd need to install drivers for your optical drive not unless it requires one which I think it won't since most laptops are built to run in one go. I think if both your ODD and SSD can plug in the same port then you'd probably don't have to worry about it.
I did this once and I never had any problems except that I had to figure out how I would cover the hole from which the ODD came out off since the HDD that I swapped was a bit, well not suitable to fit in.
I know most people don't bother with looking for drivers for their HDD's and that may be fine for the most part. Microsoft Windows seems to have most drivers bundled with their OS and it would probably work just fine. For more special HDDs or SSDs however, I would STRONGLY advise you to look for the appropriate updated drivers from their manufacturers online and install them. I had an issue with an SSD once that kept on BSODing when I put my laptop to sleep. It was due to the drivers not being updated. What would happen was the stock driver didn't put enough power into the SSD while sleep mode was on so it always failed.