Mac Pro 3,1 second optical SATA drive

[Spacedust]

I've bought second SATA drive for my Mac Pro (BluRay).

1. Installed as SATA to one of the ODD ports - works fine as AHCI, no boot.
2. Installed as IDE with 4World SATA/IDE converter - Superdrive as Master, BluRay as Slave - works fine but only UDMA33 + booting.
3. Bought another chinese adapter - there is not MASTER/SLAVE switch on it :/

Installed BluRay alone - works UDMA66 + booting
Installed BluRay + Superdrive as Master - not working
Installed BluRay + Superdrive as Slave - not working
Installed BluRay + Superdrive as Cable Select - not working

Any ideas ?

 

[Roman23]

First off..

All superdrives for the mac pros now use CABLE SELECT.. So, please use that. 2ndly, when you hook up a blu-ray or even a regular superdrive to the ODD_PORTS, you can use it completly in the mac enviornment ONLY!! You can't use it in booting other operating systems. This is a short coming to the firmware in the mac pro, as the 2006 and 2007 + 2009 naturally can boot off a sata drive for a non-mac OS.

If you want to use the drive in windows, email me privately and I can send you ahci.sh - you will have to mod the master boot record and then and only then will windows recognize the superdrive and or blu-ray drive. Not too hard, but does require you to mod the registry at points: msahci and iastorV.

Again, one of the main reasons why I sold my 2008 is because of this SEVERE limitation.. you pay good money for the hardware and find out that it won't work under other Os'es - one of the reasons why I like and HATE apple so much because they screw their customers - 2008's were screwed with VT-X and odd-ports, while 2006 and 2007 customers are screwed because of no EFI64 firmware to run the future video cards.

Anyway.. just know that any modding of any sort still won't yield a bootable drive using the odd_ports.. but, you can use the drive and windows will recognize it when you have installed the ahci drivers.

On the Mac side, this is not needed.

I've bought second SATA drive for my Mac Pro (BluRay).

1. Installed as SATA to one of the ODD ports - works fine as AHCI, no boot.
2. Installed as IDE with 4World SATA/IDE converter - Superdrive as Master, BluRay as Slave - works fine but only UDMA33 + booting.
3. Bought another chinese adapter - there is not MASTER/SLAVE switch on it :/

Installed BluRay alone - works UDMA66 + booting
Installed BluRay + Superdrive as Master - not working
Installed BluRay + Superdrive as Slave - not working
Installed BluRay + Superdrive as Cable Select - not working

Any ideas ?

 

[Roman23]

Oh, and one more thing..

Don't use any adapters at all.. you don't need them. When you hook up the superdrive or blu-ray drive to the odd_ports under mac os x, check system profiler and see if the drive is recognized. I am quite 99.9 percent sure that it is as I had the same mac pro you had, except for it being 3.2 ghz.

Blu-ray is not supported under Mac OS X at all in terms of watching a movie, but you CAN use toast to burn blu-rays.. but they are expensivo!

Forget the IDE.. you can also take that cable out of there - providing you don't need windows or linux(non-mac os x) for use with the optical drives connected to the odd_ports. As I mentioned, they are STRICTLY for mac use only...

I've bought second SATA drive for my Mac Pro (BluRay).

1. Installed as SATA to one of the ODD ports - works fine as AHCI, no boot.
2. Installed as IDE with 4World SATA/IDE converter - Superdrive as Master, BluRay as Slave - works fine but only UDMA33 + booting.
3. Bought another chinese adapter - there is not MASTER/SLAVE switch on it :/

Installed BluRay alone - works UDMA66 + booting
Installed BluRay + Superdrive as Master - not working
Installed BluRay + Superdrive as Slave - not working
Installed BluRay + Superdrive as Cable Select - not working

Any ideas ?