More than 2TB possible in a Mac Pro?

So I was at Fry's today to pick up another DVI cable so I can hook my PB to one of my LCD's, and I saw that there was a sale on Seagate 750GB 16 meg cache SATA II drives, for something like $309 or so, which is a pretty decent deal.

But, now that we're seeing 750GB drives I wonder if one could fill all four bays with them.............if one were so inclined. Or is there some sort of software limitation?

Imagine a 3.0 Gig, 3 Terabyte Mac Pro..... :black:

Some guys at barefeats managed to do it with some success. Here is the article.

novicew said:

Some guys at barefeet managed to do it with some success. Here is the article.

Click to expand...

Yes, that's quite strange. I wouldn't necessarily try to run them in RAID-0 as this guy is doing, though.

What completely startled me was, in the "perfect Mac Pro setup" he said was to boot from a Maxtor 300 Gig RAID 0 set, and another set of Maxtor 500 gigs ALSO in RAID-0 for user files. He also mentioned not using any external enclosures.

Umm, my idea of data security is not running two RAID-0 sets on my computer. That's like playing Russian Roulette. And Maxtor RAID sets to boot..... yeah right. One Maxtor is bad enough, let alone four in two RAID-0 configurations.

:yinyang:

Scroatdog said:

...One Maxtor is bad enough, let alone four in two RAID-0 configurations.

Click to expand...

LOL so true.

But seriously, would any one want to run multiple RAIDs on internal drives with out a true RAID controller? I don't know if I want my OS botting off a RAID either.

Exactly..... I'm talking about a no-RAID, 4 750GB hard drives crammed in there for 3TB. I am still wondering if there is an operating system limitation that wouln't allow you to cram 3TB in there.

There shouldn't be any OS limitation as I know there shouldn't be a hardware one. Does OSX support JBOD (just a bunch of disks)? This makes all the physical drives one logical drive without doing RAID0 and sacrificing your data. If not I guess you'll be forced to have 4 different 750GB drives unless you want to run RAID0, which I certainly do not recommend with 4 drives. The more drives you add to a RAID0 array, the more you risk in your array going kapoot...

I never heard of JBOD. Is that a real technology?

No, I would NEVER run a RAID-0 array again. Just too risky. If anything, I'd set up RAID-5 with three 750's and then another 500 for the main drive. Or maybe 4 750's in RAID-5. Who knows.

But 3 or 4 in JBOD wouldn't be bad either.

But yeah, JBOD stand for "Just a Bunch of Disks". Seriously. When implemented, it looks like one massive drive.

I don't think OSX supports RAID5, so you are stuck with either RAID1 or RAID0, neither of which make total sense in this situation...

JBOD sounds interesting, exactly what I want. In Disk Utility there's an option "Concatenated Disk Set". Is this the same thing? I'm guessing it is after reading this http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redundant_array_of_independent_disks#Concatenation_.28JBOD.29