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Where is my SSD, physically?

R

Riku7

macrumors regular
Original poster
Feb 18, 2014
208
95
This is an insane question but, where is the block of hardware known as my startup hard disk?

I have three physical disks which consist of a total of four partitions, all visible and accessible in Finder. One of the disks is partitioned for Bootcamp, hence 4 partitions.

I just opened the cover of my Mac Pro (2008) to investigate the annoying sine wave resonance that, according to other posts that I find here, is not uncommon at all. I was kind of expecting to see three of the HDD slots occupied, but instead I find two empty, and two occupied, none of which are the SSD.
I know that the SSD is physically smaller than the HDDs are, but maybe I've had my memories messed with when I moved from Mac Mini to this machine, and in order to rescue the files from the old disks which are physically smaller, they had to be sort of taped to the brackets in order to stay in place temporarily. But the pins matched.

Online search nor repair manual brought luck in trying to interpret the system info, where the SSD might reside. What does "Lower" refer to, anyway?

Connection Bus : SATA
Connection ID : "Lower"
Device Tree : IODeviceTree:/PCI0@0/SATA@1F,2/PRT1@1/PMP@0
Bay : "Lower"
 
My two SSD's are located in the optical bay where the dvd drives once were located. Same 2008 3,1 MP.

Top left section
Spring Cleaning 2.jpg
 
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Oh I see, that silver box at the top! I got this put together by a refurbisher and I was present when the SSD was being put in from a sealed box but since this is my first computer that allows tinkering, so to speak, I'm not quite yet accustomed to looking at the components that way. Yet.

Is it technically possible to have two SSDs there, by the way? I have one optical drive there now but since they're so rarely needed these days, it might be more useful to occupy that space by another SSD, maybe for Bootcamp so no operating system would have to run from a spinning hard disk.
Because at any given time, I will only be using one OS at a time, I could just pop the optical drive back in if required, or get a USB one.
 
You can also put an SSD into one of the unoccupied drive bays. As far as I know there's no advantage to hijacking the optical drive bay, other than not taking up a drive slot. If you don't have all the drive bays filled I'd use the empty ones first.
 
kschendel said:
You can also put an SSD into one of the unoccupied drive bays. As far as I know there's no advantage to hijacking the optical drive bay, other than not taking up a drive slot. If you don't have all the drive bays filled I'd use the empty ones first.
Click to expand...
You'll need some connectors I guess, because the SSD is physically too small to sit in the bracket/tray thing?
But what about speeds, SATA Express or SATA differences, something one should know about potential bottlenecks?
 
You can get a 2.5 inch SSD adapter for a few bucks; I used Icy Dock but there are others. Or you can just use a piece of adhesive velcro or even a bit of cardboard. The SSD connector should be compatible with the drive bay socket. Any SATA II or SATA III SSD will work. It's easier to find SATA III drives and they are backwards compatible with slower SATA. Since you can't drive the SSD at full transfer speed anyway you don't need to pay extra for a fancy high-end SSD. You'll get close to the full transfer rate that your SATA controller can manage, which is more than most HDD's will give you, plus eliminate rotational latency. It makes a big difference.
 
Yes, you can have two SSDs in the optical bay. You will need to route SATA cables to the two SATA ports on the motherboard, and you will need a molex splitter as well as molex to SATA-power adaptors. All of these can be obtained at most computer stores or online quite cheaply.
 
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