I'm currently running my boot drive externally connected via eSATA on a OWC Mercury Elite-AL Pro Quad (Oxford 924) Interface eSATA, enclosure with WD 640Gb 32MB cache drive. All 4 bays are occupied with storage drives and I was wondering if I could buy 2 Intel SSD X25-M 80GB, another OWC enclosure and set them up in a RAID as my boot drive? Or is there a better set up for SSD externally?
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2 Intel SSD X25-M 80GB RAID for Early 08 MP
- Thread starter cerbx1
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Move your HD's to an external enclosure and put your SSD's inside the machine. You don't want to throttle your SSD's with some kind of interface bottleneck... let them have direct access to the ICH. The other drives can perform just as well on USB2, FW, or eSATA port replication.
Can you get access to the extra sata ports on the mother board? I used those on my Mac Pro 2006 version 1.1, and connected up two of those Intels in raid0 to those extra ports. Works great. Some benchmark software days I get 540 mb/sec. All I care is it works and is fast. I have heard that later versions of the Mac Pro had those ports disabled. Not sure about yours.
Thank you for your response, very helpful.
They're occupied by OWC extender cable.
http://eshop.macsales.com/item/Newer Technology/MPQXES2/
That was why I was wondering if I could enclose them and connect them through eSATA.
Where did you place them in the cabinet?
You may not believe it, but I wrapped them together with rubber bands and wedged them under the 3rd and 4th HD bays and the top of the memory cage with some rubber blocks (actually rubber roadbed for HO model trains). Since they generate almost no heat, it is safe to put them virtually anywhere.
iirc they were just "standard" esata to esata cables I got on Amazon - 18 inch. I went through hoops trying to find right angle connectors; finally just used what I had and they worked perfectly. About $2 each. If I can find the order (on another computer) I'll send the actual mfr and part number.