**GUIDE: Bootable Mac Pro 2009-10 SATA III + eSATA Guide + TRIM **

[amccallum1]

Great Post, Concorde Rules.

Your guide is worth reading even if someone isn't planning to build a big internal RAID, just to verify that the Rocket controller cards work in Macs -- that might be obvious to some, but not to someone like me who does modest modding, infrequently.

Why I'm so pleased to learn about the Rocket cards is that I've been looking for a PCIe card with **INTERNAL** SATA ports, just simply to add extra hard drives inside my Mac Pro. You can stuff extra drives into a Mac Pro's spare optical drive bay, as you show with your RAID mod -- but the issue is connecting them, since each optical bay only has one SATA connection (the 2008 Mac Pros had a couple of spare SATA ports on the motherboard, but they disappeared with the 2009 models).

There are other non-RAID reasons to add hard disks too: like multiple booting options. You can even use the software RAID in Mac OS (free!) to make 0/JBOD or 1/striped RAIDS.

I have always wanted to try building a 4-disk 0-on-1 RAID (stripe of mirrored pairs) and see if the Mac OS RAID software will do it. Maybe I'll try now......!

Thanks again,



[QUOTE=Concorde Rules;16264287]
Host card: Highpoint Rocket 640L Lite (£60) or Highpoint RocketRAID 640L Lite (£100)
[URL="http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=CB-039-AK"]

[amccallum1]

Great guide, thanks.

Do you by any chance know whether Highpoint offers a card with TWO internal SATA ports that works in a Mac Pro?

I have tried to ask Highpoint itself, but it is a Taiwanese company and its Web support does not work; I don't think phoning them will help... the specs on their web site don't include Mac/Windows compatibility: maddening...

I'm asking because the 4-port 640L that you used is priced at $70 here in the USA, while Highpoint has a Winders 2-port version currently on offer at $20. Big difference if you don't need 4 ports, and i don't. If they had a 2-port Mac version at $20, or even at $30, that'd be a big help....

Thanks,

[Maxpecas]

The 2 ports highpoint card is not based on the same controller. I think you will have bad result with. It's a PCIe x1 card with 9130 Marvell controller ( 380 Mbits Read, 230 Mbits Write Max).

I Will test some cheaper card based on Marvell 9230 this week. I hope that it's OS X compatible ...

[Concorde Rules]

Originally Posted by amccallum1

Great guide, thanks.

Do you by any chance know whether Highpoint offers a card with TWO internal SATA ports that works in a Mac Pro?

I have tried to ask Highpoint itself, but it is a Taiwanese company and its Web support does not work; I don't think phoning them will help... the specs on their web site don't include Mac/Windows compatibility: maddening...

I'm asking because the 4-port 640L that you used is priced at $70 here in the USA, while Highpoint has a Winders 2-port version currently on offer at $20. Big difference if you don't need 4 ports, and i don't. If they had a 2-port Mac version at $20, or even at $30, that'd be a big help....

Thanks,

It's probably going to be poor performance and pci-e 1x, which is 400MB/sec max.

The 640L is the cheapest 2x card and it just happens to have 4 ports.

[amccallum1]

Originally Posted by Concorde Rules

It's probably going to be poor performance and pci-e 1x, which is 400MB/sec max.

The 640L is the cheapest 2x card and it just happens to have 4 ports.

Gottit thanks. It can't hurt to have a couple of unused ports for a while... future-proofing... thanks again.