5th hard drive installation

[jasonwang99]

Hey folks,

Just thought you might be interested in my experiences installing a fifth hard drive in the optical bay of my semi-new Mac Pro:

Here's the link:

-Jason

 

[slughead]

You referenced my article!

I was wondering why I was getting views this week.

Good article, btw, and nice page.

 

[statikcat]

Awesome I will find this very handy! Although I already have an external SATA enclosure. So where is a good place to take the cable from the mobo outside the case to the external enclosure? I guess I could get a esata card.. but couldn't I just leave a pcix slot empty and take the cable outside the case through that open slot?

 

[slughead]

Awesome I will find this very handy! Although I already have an external SATA enclosure. So where is a good place to take the cable from the mobo outside the case to the external enclosure? I guess I could get a esata card.. but couldn't I just leave a pcix slot empty and take the cable outside the case through that open slot?

That's what I do now with my external mess.

The way to do it is just to take off a PCIe cover and string it through.

They also sell a PCIe plate with SATA ports on the outside and cables on the inside which go to the motherboard ports. That's probably the 'neatest' way to do it.
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Edit:
also beware: the ports on the inside of the case only work if you plug them directly into the drive. They do not work with port multipliers (which are present on many external enclosures)

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Edit2:
In spite of the fact that they are SATA, Apple has decided not to let you hot swap drives.

You may unplug drives while the computer is on (at your own risk), but plugging them back in again will always result in a kernel panic.

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Edit3:

Oh, and these two extra on-board ports DO NOT WORK IN BOOTCAMP!!

 

[statikcat]

Well that is good to know about bootcamp ahead of time! I am guessing the BC drivers are just not written to take full advantage of the motherboard? Or just not written to ID a hard drive where it would expect a slot drive?

 

[slughead]

Well that is good to know about bootcamp ahead of time! I am guessing the BC drivers are just not written to take full advantage of the motherboard? Or just not written to ID a hard drive where it would expect a slot drive?

I think it may be a driver issue.

Apple uses a deviant version of the 5000x chipset so not everything works right (like variable fan control in windows).

 

[jasonwang99]

Slughead - thanks for your article... helped me figure things out for sure. I'm tempted to try your x1900 "upgrade" too but I don't really need a nice graphics card.

I didn't know the ports didn't work with bootcamp. I haven't tried booting to windows yet but it sounds like I'm not going to be able to access any of the data since I have it setup as a RAID 10. Oh well... no big deal since windows is just there as a just in case. And there's plenty of room on the system drive since I don't put data on it. I'll let you know if something unexpected happens.