Friday, October 14th, 2011 Author: Most of the time, your average xpc has a longer useful life than its PC counterpart. Unfortunately, the fast evolution of technology means that, after a while, that older Mac may seem a little slow and may not be able to take full advantage of current tech. Such is the case for earlier Mac Pros. Wmv player for mac download. As they currently sit, they only move data at SATA 2.0 speeds, roughly three gigabits per second. If you wish to put the drives in to a RAID array, you are limited to either a mirrored RAID 1, losing half your capacity, or a RAID 0, which is faster, but increases the risk of data loss. On top of that, those RAID levels are all software-based, which can reduce overall performance.

I've gone through an Apricorn X1 (Slowish, and crashed my system). 5) There are 2 internal SATA ports that I've run to my 5.25' bay so I can. 2009->2010 Mac Pro. EDIT: Here's 2 Samsung 840 Pros in the Syba SD-PEX40068 vs a. The product will be recognized as a PCIe x4 Bus Controller card.

Fortunately, if you happen to have a 2006-2008 Mac Pro, you can improve the performance in those bays, with only one small thing to lookout for. How does it work? The backplane (where the drives in the bays are connected) consists of four pass-thru SATA connections which are, in turn, connected to the SATA controller on the logic board (located near the front of the Mac Pro) via a mini-SAS connector. The great thing is that mini-SAS is a fairly common connector for PCIe SATA controller cards. The trick is to find one with that mini-SAS connector on the inside. This fits the bill. Not only does it feature six internal mini-SAS ports, it also has a built-in (hardware) RAID controller which supports RAID Level 0, 1, 5, 10, and 50 along with individual drive support and disk spanning, as well as an external port for more expansion options.

In fact, there’s a hidden paint program on your Mac computer that has been sitting right under your nose this whole time, and a recent pose will show you how easy it is to find.

But we’re getting ahead of ourselves; let’s concentrate on upgrading those drive bays. What’s involved in the process? Once you install the Highpoint card in your Mac, you’ll notice that the mini-SAS cable that connects to the logic board is located near the front of the Mac Pro and the internal port on the card is located near the rear – much too far away from each other to connect. This is easily remedied, however, by using to bridge the distance. Once connected, the four drive bays in the Mac Pro are now being controlled by the RAID card, making it capable of both high-speed data transfer and more advanced RAID options. At this point, we run into a bit of a problem; the Highpoint card isn’t bootable in a Mac.

You will need to put your OS on a drive installed in one of the optical bays. For the best performance, we suggest getting an and attaching it via one of the “extra” SATA 2.0 connectors on the logic board, located near the front of the Mac Pro. Just run a SATA cable from the drive to this connector on the logic board (you’ll probably have to remove the fan to do this) and use to adapt the power from the drive bay for your SATA drive. If you don’t want to go the SSD route, you also have the option of hooking up much the same way. You can install the system on this “fifth” drive, and use your upgraded hard drive bays to set up a RAID array for maximum data transfer. There’s only one situation where this won’t work: if you happen to use Boot Camp to run Windows on your Mac. Apple doesn’t support Boot Camp on these “extra” connectors.

In that instance, you’ll need to use hooked to the ATA connector in the drive bay. You’ll lose a lot of the speed advantage during booting and launching when you do it this way, but at least you still retain Boot Camp capability. Whichever drive type and size you choose to put your OS on, that include all the mounts and cables necessary to make installing it into the drive bay a simple process.