- Joined
- Aug 12, 2007
- Messages
- 408
- Reaction score
- 5
- Points
- 18
- Location
- UK
- Your Mac's Specs
- Mac pro Quad Xeon; 15" Retina Macbook Pro; macbooks (family); Macbook pro 17"; intel & G4 iMacs.
Its not that bad really and with the amount of dust and fluff I pulled out of mine its become silent again! Well worth the effort!! Anyway the main board on the mac pro has 6 SATA ports four of which connect to the on board HDs and two just sit there. You can use these last two in just the same way as the others IE they can also be used for hard drives. You could fit another SATA hard drive in the lower optical bay! OR take both SATA ports to the back of the computer and fit them to sockets for external drives.
Also - the Apple RAID card just ignores these 6 sockets replacing them with its own ie the cables that run to the HD brackets get connected to the RAID card rather than the motherboard. There was a lot of talk about not being able to mix drive types when the RAID card came out but you could fit the RAID card hooked up the the built in HD bays with SAS drives and then fit
a cable to the 2nd optical bay and fit a 1Tb SATA drive there. You could of course modify the cabling to make bay 1 go to the onboard SATA and bays 2-4 go to the RAID card giving you the option that most people wanted! Anyway its a thought. It even allows 5Tb of storage inside - scary !
