How much storage is available in my Mac Pro?

[Loyalty4Life]

I have the first gen Mac Pro. It was advertised as holding up to 2TB or storage (500GB x 4). I have heard that more storage is possible though. Can anyone verify this? Can I put 1TB drives in here? What's the storage limit?

Thanks for your help!

 

[inigel]

I haven't heard of anyone complaining about storage barriers. Theoretically, 4TB sounds doable.

 

[DoFoT9]

using 64-bit hardware, the MP can theoretically take 512 terrabytes (i think).

you are limited by the current technology, the largest hard drives you can get are 1.5TB, so youcan get 4x1.5TB which is 6TB.

 

[Loyalty4Life]

Very good info. Thanks for responding.

 

[hwojtek]

I haven't heard of anyone complaining about storage barriers. Theoretically, 4TB sounds doable.

Bumping to 6TB - with four Seagate Barracudda 7200.11 1.5 TB drives.

 

[DoFoT9]

Very good info. Thanks for responding.

thats ok, im very jealous of your MP haha.

apparently you can expand your MP to have 6 bays (using the internal CD/DVD sata bay drives i believe), that would expand you to a total of 9TB

add in some external eSata drive and you could easily hit 15TB.

 

[rockinrocker]

thats ok, im very jealous of your MP haha.

apparently you can expand your MP to have 6 bays (using the internal CD/DVD sata bay drives i believe), that would expand you to a total of 9TB

add in some external eSata drive and you could easily hit 15TB.

you can also just use the other two sata connections on the motherboard if you want to use your optical bays for something else.
one of these helps tidy it up a bit:
http://eshop.macsales.com/item/Newer Technology/MPQXES2/

 

[sickmacdoc]

As long as we are reaching for the sky the MaxUpgrades MaxPro brackets allow you to use a total of 8 drives internally without using any PCI cards.

4 Standard SATA drives (4x1.5Tb)
2 SATA drives using the extra onboard SATA connectors (2x1.5Gb)
2 more IDE drives using the optical drive IDE/PATA cables (2x750Gb since that is the largest IDE hard drives made)

...for a total of 10.5Tb internally!

(Of course that requires Seagate to actually fix the problems with 1.5Tb drives noted in a lot of other threads, but it will be possible after they do!)