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Mac Pro SATA Optical Drives

jabbawok

jabbawok

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Sep 30, 2004
335
95
Worcestershire
Has anyone used one of the internal sata connectors to connect an optical drive? Part of me thinks that's what they were put there for, under the optical bay. I'm after a Blue Ray Drive and loads of them are SATA.
Cheers.
 
I've connected another HD to one of those extra ports. Works fine. I figured they were there for future optical drives as well.
 
I have two SATA DVD burners (Samsung SH-203B, Lite-on LH-20A1S) connected to the extra SATA ports.
 
Cheers, I was thinking of an LG GGW-H20L will burn DVDs and Blue Ray, and play DVD HD-DVD and Blur-Ray and it's £190... Ahha I remeber spending that kind of money on a 12 speed SCSI CD-R...
 
I was thinking about making a post asking if anyone had done this and what steps were required.. but figured it was moot since the revised Mac Pros should be using a different mobo. Hopefully the optical drives in the MP 2.0 will be all SATA and won't even have to worry about IDE.
 
Are there any updates on this in regards to the new Mac Pros? As far as I know, they are still using ATA drives.
 
Hey guys.
I just grabbed a pair of SATA optical drives to plug into my tower. I take off the cover and theres the sata connectors. How the heck do you get an sata cable into there??? Theres like... no room at all to get in there!
 
sata drives should work fine in there.. they aren't anything proprietary, its sata.

to get to the ports on the logic board, you have to disassemble a bunch of ****. i just installed my newertech esata extender and used the directions from that. they should probably be on their website
 
3 hours later I finally got it connected. What a huge pain in the ass. GRRRRR apple.
 
Bootability with windows installer

Hello,

I know I am kind of late responding here, but I am in a sort of a bind. I have a Mac Pro 3,1 2008 and I now know that connecting any Hard disk drive w/bootcamp + AHCI drivers does not provide bootability whatsoever, however I was really wondering if any of you who have SATA optical drives installed can load the windows installer with it?

I was told in another forum that the ODD_SATA ports are not bootable with HDDs using bootcamp, as the drivers are legacy. But, for booting a windows installer, does the sata drive recognize it?

Help? anyone?
 
NADAV35, in the other thread you started the user Bagodonuts replaced the IDE superdrive with a Blu-Ray SATA drive and got it working in AHCI mode.

The MP3,1 is the only model that has EFI64 firmware and boots ODDs from IDE superdrives. The previous models had EFI32 and the 2009 model has no IDE in the chipset.

Pending further confirmation it looks likely that MP3,1 (2008) will either run an IDE optical drive and no Windows drives in AHCI mode or no IDE drive and any choice of HDD, SSD and ODD drives with Windows in AHCI.

So we have to discriminate the following cases when we look at the ODD SATA ports.

MP1,1 and MP2,1 (2006 and 2007):
  1. have EFI32
  2. have IDE in the chipset
  3. can activate both ODD-SATA ports for Windows in AHCI mode while ODD runs from IDE
  4. cannot run kernel64 and need Jowie's tweak to boot 64-bit Windows DVDs

MP3,1 (2008):
  1. has EFI64
  2. has IDE in the chipset
  3. can activate both ODD-SATA ports for Windows in AHCI mode only when IDE ports are not used (by optical drives)
  4. can run kernel64 and directly boot 64-bit Windows DVDs

MP4,1 (2009):
  1. has EFI64
  2. has no IDE in the chipset
  3. can activate both ODD-SATA ports for Windows in AHCI mode
  4. can run kernel64 and directly boot 64-bit Windows DVDs
 
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