Using the extra 2 SATA ports on 2008 MP

Anyone using the 2 sata ports on the motherboard? I want to put in 2 SSD's (2x80GB) and RAID 0 them in the second optical bay (I will take the second drive out, it's already broken anyway). I know OWC Sells these, but was wondering if I will have issues with booting to OS X by raiding these two SSD's? Also I read somewhere that it doesn't work for Windows booting via Bootcamp, is this correct?

I pretty much don't want to use up the 2 bays because SSD's are so tiny, so why not utilize the 2 ports?

Thank you

P.S. Is there a cheaper solution than the OWC? I guess Duct tape?

Thank you guys!

Ok so I'm just going to get a fairly cheap Dual 2.5 to 3.5 adapter. Already have right angled SATA cables and molex to SATA power...so this won't be costly, then

I did some research and it seems that you can definitely boot from a RAID0 for OS X.

Was just wondering if those two ports are any different than the available bays. Seems they're just normal ones.

I wanted to do RAID 0 because I just bought Intel 80GB SSD's for super cheap (they were on sale, couldn't pass up)...Write on these are 70MB/sec, with reads up to 250MB/sec, so I assumed if I do RAID 0 I would get the benefit of double the space on a single volume and max out the SATA 2 speeds at least.

Anyone think I will have issues going this route?

Ah yes, you are right about the 5.25...so I need to go 5.25 > 3.5 > Dual 2.5

hfg said:

I am using the motherboard SATA ports to drive a pair of OWC 240GB SSDs in RAID-0 in the optical bay using the OWC brackets. It boots OS X fine and is wicked fast even though it is SATA-II. You will need a cheap molex-dual_sata power adapter cable. This is in a 2008 Mac Pro 3,1 computer.

Absolutely no problems!


-howard

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Cheers! Going to do this once I get the SSD's.

2x80GB Intel SSD's for $80, couldn't pass them up.

All my bays are filled up with HDD's, might toss some of them out as they're pretty old.

Do you know if Windows installs fine on those 2 ports? I keep reading windows doesn't work on those ports. Oh well, not a huge loss, I'll probably install it on one of the older bay drives.

Loa said:

Hello,

If you RAID0 for 160GB, then fine, but IMO you won't see significant speed benefits for a boot volume. For instance, boot time won't be cut in half, nor will app load times, etc...

Loa

Click to expand...

The biggest reason for raiding was to get double the space on a single volume. I got super cheap and got really small SSD's

I wonder if I can just use the single 80GB for the OS and the rest on the internal HDD's (I have 4).

Loa said:

Yep. I had that set-up for a while. I switched to get a bigger SSD and a sata3 PCIe card for higher speed as well. That faster SSD is also my boot drive, but the speed is for my raw files on it, not the system. If I still had slots left in my mac, I'd probably put the 80gb ssd back in for the OS, but my Mac is full!

Loa

Click to expand...

Do you think if I upgrade the SSD (single) in the future, I can just use a cloner app to copy the OS over without reinstalling?

I keep hearing people having issues from HDD to SSD clones, but never read about people going from SSD to SSD.

hfg said:

I get essentially the same speed with a pair of SATA-II OWC 240GB SSDs in RAID-0 on the motherboard ports as I get with a SATA-III Crucial M4 on a Solo x2 PCIe card. One big improvement with the RAID-0 is faster write times. The PCIe card boots a bit slower because it seems to be the last interface to be recognized (appears as an external drive) in the boot-up sequence. But once it starts, it too boots very quickly.



-howard

Click to expand...

I think SSD's are such speed boosters where they can race as fast as the CPU. It's amazing to me that I can put in a device into a almost 6 year old machine which makes the whole system fast in day to day operations.

Just an update, I RAID 0'd 2x80GB Intel X25M's and it is a fantastic upgrade! I put them both in the second bay (removed an old DVD burner) and left the top one intact.

I used this and a Molex to dual SATA power and of course 2x SATA connectors from the motherboard to the SSD's.

Some of you mentioned that if I RAID0 I won't really gain much performance, but check out the screenshot. I also did a test with a single drive and it was half of that. Theoretically if I used a SATAIII SSD (these SSD's that I have are an old model, but was cheap and couldn't pass up) I would definitely hit the SATAII wall.

One downside to this is that Mountain Lion will not install the recovery partition on a RAID 0/1, so you have to make a boot disc/usb if you need to go into recovery.

I plan to upgrade to a larger single SSD in the future so I will just copy this partition over and work from a single SSD and use the other 2 for something else.

Thanks guys for all the help!