2008 Mac Pro 5.25 bay Dual SSD upgrade

Hello All

I have a 2008 Mac Pro with a spare IDE optical slot.

My queries are as follows:

What I wanted to do was to get a 5.25" to dual 2.5" adaptor (LINK) and run two SSD's, one for the operating system and one as a scratch drive/plugins drive. The Mac Pro has two spare SATA ports, so thats not a problem. I have seen you can buy Molex to Dual SATA power cables.
Would it be safe for me to run two SSD's off the one molex power cable?

Secondly, would it be suitable to run the main boot drive from those secondary SATA ports, or should I only run the boot drive from one of the main HDD sleds?

Thanks in advance!

Chris

Chris in my Mac Pro days always ran the boot drive from Bay One. Technicians have told me on boot, this is the first placed checked for the operating system to boot the machine. Would think the optical drive slot, even connected to SATA via Molex, would be the slowest boot times. Maybe a PCI-e SSD would be the go with 10GB/s transfer rates if the bucks run to it:-


http://www.imore.com/turbocharging-mac-pro-ssds-heres-how

Hi Harry, Thanks for the reply

I don't have any fast PCI slots left unfortunately, taken up by two graphics cards. Plus PCI SSD cards are a bit out of my price range!

I have an SSD in my Macbook Pro Laptop, and when I first installed it, the boot up time took ages to get to the apple logo, then after that it pretty much loaded straight away. Initially I was disappointed, as It took over a minute to load, and I was expecting it to be a lot quicker. Then I read online that I needed to set the default startup drive in system preferences. Once I had done this, then the Macbook Pro started up in 24 seconds. As it was still looking for the original hard drive, then when it couldn't find it, it booted from the SSD. So surely if I just chose the Startup drive as the spare SATA port, it shouldn't make a difference no? My main concern is the use of the Molex to dual SATA power adaptor being safe?

Thanks

From memory Chris, and it is like me getting old and frail, the SATA cables have an additional wire over IDE/Molex adapters, orange colored, to carry 3.3v. You might check out if SSD's need this power or maybe you can get by cutting it off?

I thought I would update this thread.

OWC do a kit for the 2008 model mac pro with the molex that has the Molex to dual SATA.
As I'm in the UK, their kit was too expensive for UK purchase, but I managed to pretty much cobble together the bits from their kit through Amazon.

I can confirm that the SSD works perfectly booting from SATA port 6 (ODD2).

Heres my kit:



A great upgrade and definitely worth doing!