Hey guys, I just got my new Mac Pro and I'm trying to install some extra drives to it. I've read about the unused SATA ports on the motherboard but I can't seem to find them. I tried searching but I had no luck. Anyone know where they are and how I can access them easily?
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Can't find the unused SATA ports on Mac Pro
- Thread starter cowm007
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Ohhh I see where they are now. Thanks for the link.
Btw, I found an unused power connector in the optical bay area (as well as an unused parallel ATA connection). I'll probably run the drives internally from there using a molex->sata power adapter or whatever they're called. I read that's how the MaxConnect product powers the drives.
I'm putting 6 drives in my Mac Pro. Drive 1 is OS X. Drive 2 is Windows. Drive 3-6 is a RAID array which will be used as my new home folder. Hopefully it'll work out and I'll find the parts I'm missing tomorrow morning at Fry's electronics.
I'm making a custom bracket to hold the optical and the drives. I like the MaxConnect setup but it's too expensive at $129. Mine probably won't look as nice as the regular optical bay module, but it should hold things in place. That should be the easy part anyway, it was a such pain to route the SATA cables to the optical bay area.
Did you finish this project?? If so, can you post pics of your jury-rigged solution??
I just got done putting one drive under the optical bay, using some metal things that came w/ my Stacker case to fit a 3.5 drive into a 5 1/4 bay. SNUG fit is all I can say. I actually pulled the fan assembly out of there to get to the SATA ports. I didn't have a 90 degree SATA cable, but luckily I had some SATA cables from my DFI board that were pretty small, so it fit nicely. Now that I think about it, I think I'd like to do a 6 drive as you suggested. Or maybe not. Maybe I can RAID-1 drives 5-6 as a backup to the backup. Right now I've got 1 74 gig Raptor w/ Leopard on it, one 400 gig w/ Windows, one 500 gig drive for Apple Loops, Jam Packs, and other Logic/Soundtrack Pro stuff, and one 750 gig drive that's partitioned 500/250 (well, minus that when you do the conversion) for recording music, doing video, etc.
It's an o.k. setup I suppose. But I've got stuff everywhere (except on the 320 in bay "5". I thought about using that for Time Machine, but I may just use Carbon Copy Cloner instead.
Decisions, decisions, decisions.
That MaxConnect looked like a good solution....... until I saw the price.
