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Six internal HDDs in MacPro - HowTo ?

H

Horst

Guest
Original poster
Jan 10, 2006
326
0
Okay, I did quite some research , to no avail, now I'm wondering if someone can point me to a solution.

I'd like to put two harddrives into my 2008 MacPro, in addition to the 4 drives already installed in the bays.

There are 2 extra Sata ports on the motherboard, so I figure I need to get a Sata-Sata cable, build some sort of tray to fit the drives securely into the lower DVD drive bay, so far so good, no big deal; I understand the extra Sata ports are more easily accessable in the 2008 MP.

But how about power , will I need some extra power supply, or does the Sata cable take care of that ?

I know about the brackets one can get for external eSata drives, and this solution .

Basically, I'd like to DIY the maxupgrades kit, looks like just a pricy tray to my untrained eye, or is there more to it ?
 
SATA cables from the board to your hard drive. Use molex to power your hard drive. There are two up there in the optical drive, one being used by the optical drive.
 
Keep in mind before you do this that those two SATA ports are not bootable.
 
h.21 said:
Keep in mind before you do this that those two SATA ports are not bootable.
Click to expand...

Huh? They boot just fine provided in MacOSX...
I was using them just this afternoon, while i migrated my system application to the new RAID setup...

If i were you, i'd stop reading blogs of other people and try it yourself!
 
Thanks very much for the tips .

I understand HDDs connected to the SATA 5&6 ODD ports are treated by OSX, including Leopard, just like regular drives, but are not usable with bootcamp .


What I'd like to do is have 2 HDDs in Softraid0 for system and applications (on Partition 1) , and the same for large work files (Photoshop, Cinema 4D).

Plus one drive with a bootcamp partition and a PS scratch disc on Partition 1 (assumably faster).

Right now I have all of the above, only the work file drive is a single one (partitioned into work - other data dump).

Comments welcome ;) !
 
Goodness, I can't believe how long it took me to find that simple info, I'm usually quite good with Google ... ;)

For the record, here are some links detailing how to use the additional ODD Sata ports on the Mac Pro's motherboard, maybe those help some other adventurous computer noob :

DIY:

MacPro 2008 5th internal HDD , check links for more .

Same for MacPro 2007, with parts list


Commercial solutions:

1 additional HDD

2-4 additional HDDs

Bracket for external eSata drives , Sonnet offers a similar product.
How-To and discussion here .

In general, either solution seems to work just fine, assembly seems to be fairly easy on the 2008 Mac Pro, performance is excellent, OSX recognices the drives, Softraid works, Raid cards require some extra effort.
Bootcamp won't work, but there have been a few users claiming sucess with drives which had a Bootcamp partition preinstalled, I'll check it out.

I'll report back once my 5th drive is installed.
 
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