have replaced it with a CalDigit combo card of USB3 / eSATA and seems to be fine too/QUOTE]
Hi there,
Thank you for your thoughts about the MiniPro enclosure (USB3 and eSATA). I will do a little more digging myself now. Now, about the card you mention. Are you saying it gives you USB3 on your Mac Pro? I tried to follow a thread on the Mac Pro forum on the subject of getting USB3 to work, and it seemed to me that everyone was having trouble. Some people had put in cards, but they'd have to re-boot every time they connected a USB3 device. Sounded awful to me.
regards,
malch
I basically have all 6 possible SATA connections taken by drives and one DVD burner. So my boot drive is an SSD mounted in a PCIe slot, that was causing my conflict, I did some minor hoop jumping and now all is good. If you get the one Caldigit eSata / USB3 card, then you won't likely have conflicts with another PCIe card like whatever one you are currently using for eSata. It all depends on what else you have got going, at least with a 5,1 you have all PCIe 2.0 slots.
I just took delivery of a Lexar USB3 card reader and it does great on the MacPro, none of the conflicts that the other folks are using.
The one thing you might want to consider in using an external boot drive for real work is that both TB and FW are bi-directional which could make a fair bit of difference in actual use. USB is not, it is one direction at a time so it is great for gobs of data transfer but TB would be best for boot.
I think you could just try the eSATA option and see how it goes, but you could also get the Seagate drive enclosure and use a TB to FW800 adapter to get data off of the MacPro, that is what I was doing before I got my OWC drive and it honestly worked great, max FW800 speeds.
But yeah, the Caldigit card I put in has been pretty good so far, stable, fast and makes my MacPro a little less dated....
