2 Extra Sata II's on Mac Pro 2008?

[dannymarr]

I was corresponding with an ebay seller about purchasing his old Mac Pro and he said something very odd. He said he put two hard drives in the second optical drive bay because there is 2 spare SATA II connections on the motherboard. Is this true?

There is one open 5.25 bay for a second optical drive (like a blue ray) - or, I used the spare 5.25 slot to house two additional hard drives for a total of 6 internal drives.

A little known fact, but the motherboard has 2 spare SATAII connections (it is documented in the developer notes on the machine). I had 6 drives in the case all running off the built in SATAII bus (no need to add an additional PCI card) - configured the machine with a RAID0 strip using Apple's software raid and the machine was incredibly fast.

With the enterprise edition Seagate drives, I got sustained read and write throughput between 400-500MB/s!!! Combine that with filling all the memory slots so you get the full 256bit memory transfer and the machine just screams...

So this sort of thing is possible without buying additional components like the Pro Caddy 2?

http://www.transintl.com/store/category.cfm?Category=2761&RequestTimeOut=500

 

[netdog]

The optical drives are SATA, not SATA two. If you were to do without any internal optical drives, you could theoretically mount 4 SATA II drives and 2 SATA drives, but with the size of discs today, why would you need 6 drives?

Keep that extra optical for your future BluRay or for a 2nd optical drive that you can set to a different region of foreign DVDs.

 

[myca]

I was corresponding with an ebay seller about purchasing his old Mac Pro and he said something very odd. He said he put two hard drives in the second optical drive bay because there is 2 spare SATA II connections on the motherboard. Is this true?



So this sort of thing is possible without buying additional components like the Pro Caddy 2?

http://www.transintl.com/store/category.cfm?Category=2761&RequestTimeOut=500

I'm not sure how easy it would be to get 2 drives in the 2nd optical bay, but it's true that there are 2 spare SATA ports in the mac pro, one company has brought out a nifty sata to esata extender cable that utilises this hidden gem.

http://macenstein.com/default/archives/678

 

[dannymarr]

The optical drives are SATA, not SATA two. If you were to do without any internal optical drives, you could theoretically mount 4 SATA II drives and 2 SATA drives, but with the size of discs today, why would you need 6 drives?

Keep that extra optical for your future BluRay or for a 2nd optical drive that you can set to a different region of foreign DVDs.

Thanks for the reply. I'm interested in RAIDing ... I agree with you that if you wen't RAIDing you should just save it for blu-ray

 

[Nadav35]

Success burning 2 disks at the same time.

Hello,

My current Mac Pro is a 2008 3,1 with two IDE 22x(both are the same) superdrives running off the IDE BUS. My question:

If I were to replace one of those drives with a SATA drive using one of the ODD Ports, will my burning two disks at the same time speed up? Or is it better to just get rid of the two IDE drives I have and get two sata optical drives??

Also, has anyone attempted to boot into bootcamp using the ODD SATA ports via an OPTICAL DRIVE only?? I know with a HDD it won't work due to AHCI. I currently have AHCI recognized in windows 7. Also, will the SATA optical drives be recognized and work in VMWARE FUSION 3 and Paralells 5?