Second SSD in optical bay?

[danqi]

I have a 2010 Mac Pro and right now there are 4 regular hard drives in the hard drive bays, one SSD in the lower optical bay (my start up volume) and the SuperDrive in the upper optical bay. I would like to add another SSD and don't really ever use the SuperDrive, so I was wondering if I can simply unplug the cable from the SuperDrive and attach it to the SSD? I would then probably leave the SuperDrive where it is and let the two SSDs rest in the lower bay without a tray.

Are there any disadvantages to this approach? Would the speed be lower than if I were to put it into one of the regular hard drive bays?

 

[RoastingPig]

yes i threw out my optical bay along time ago and have 2 samsung 830 ssds in there. there are no disadvantages to doing this there is no speed degradation

 

[SoyCapitanSoyCapitan]

You can stick the SuperDrive in an external FireWire enclosure.

 

[DPUser]

You can stick the SuperDrive in an external FireWire enclosure.

… or you can move it to the lower bay and use it as a shelf to support your SSDs. I have four sitting on top of my unused optical drive in my Mac Pro.

 

[adam9c1]

Do you have some sort of card to drive four?

 

[DPUser]

Do you have some sort of card to drive four?

2 connected to optical bay ports, 2 connected to a card like this:

http://www.ebay.com/itm/PCI-E-To-SA...ard-ASM1061-/191572577652?hash=item2c9a9d8d74

Inexpensive; not the fastest, but works just fine.

 

[danqi]

Thanks! I did it and it seems to work fine (but I have not done any speed tests or the like)!

 

[adam9c1]

Do you know if you can have a time machine drive connected to this port on the card? Can you boot from TM and possibly restore?

 

[Dc2006ster]

Not sure about the 2010 MacPro, but my 2006 has two SATA connectors on the motherboard. I connected two SATA cables, I think from OWC, one straight one L shaped from those connectors and fed them into the lower optical bay to two SSD drives.

 

[DPUser]

Not sure about the 2010 MacPro, but my 2006 has two SATA connectors on the motherboard. I connected two SATA cables, I think from OWC, one straight one L shaped from those connectors and fed them into the lower optical bay to two SSD drives.

The 2009-12 MP's use SATA optical drives, so the "secret" SATA ports are no more. You can still trace the optical bay connections back to the motherboard to replace the SATA cables if necessary.