[action]

hi gang,

i'm planning on getting a mac pro and using the additional 2 sata connections on the mother board to install two additional sata drives via the connection. my question is are the connections easy to access?

thanks in advance for your help.

chung lee

[brokenjago]

I can't see them inside mine.

Then again, I didn't look too hard.

I know they're there though

[revox]

I can see them inside mine but you got to use very tiny SATA connectors like Apples own because there's limited space for the connectors.

[MaxPower2k3]

They're fixed to the back of the hard drive bay, so all you have to do to install a new drive is screw the bracket on and slide it into the drive bay. Makes it really easy to add/swap drives. If you needed to extend/re-route those connections for whatever reason, that probably makes things harder. There's two more SATA connections for the optical drive bays that are probably easier to access/extend than the four hard drive connections.

[crystalcove]

I'm planning on buying a Macpro. I read that installing two different sata drives (mac drive,pre-installed, and seagate barracuda) is not a good idea. Any ideas?

[Leonard]

Originally Posted by crystalcove 

I read that installing two different sata drives (mac drive,pre-installed, and seagate barracuda) is not a good idea.

I've never heard that, other than of course a RAID. In a RAID you of course want the drives to be the same in size and being as similar as possible never hurts. You can have any SATA drive in your Mac Pro. A Western Digital Raptor is nice for a startup drive or if you want speed.

Are Raptors any noisier than 7200 RPM drives? I was thinking of getting one if I buy I new Mac Pro soon.

[P]

Originally Posted by Leonard 

Are Raptors any noisier than 7200 RPM drives? I was thinking of getting one if I buy I new Mac Pro soon.

I'd say they're noisier than the mean for 7200 RPM drives, but there is a quite a bit of spread inside that spectrum these days.

[danbrew]

I've got a MacPro that has the following drives:

Bay 1: Stock 250 gig drive that came with it. SATA/300 7200.
Bay 2 & 3: Western Digital 500 gig SATA/300 7200.
Bay 4: Western Digital 250 gig SATA/150 7200.

Everything works just fine.

[action]

hi gang,

i went to a computer store and to the dismay of the sales person i opened up a mac pro and started looking for the two additional sata connections. it's just below the lower right corner of the drive 01. it's behind the top right edge of the fan assembly. it looks like there
is room to hook up a couple of sata connections but not sure how much room there is without modification to get the sata cables to the second optical bay where i would store the two extra drives.

thanks for everyone's input. if i'm able to get six drives in a mac pro then i can comfortably not use my 4 bay sata box i'm currently using with my g5. i wonder there will be a drastic change to the motherboard if the octo's come out. once the octo's come out i will decide between the fastest octo or the fastest quads. will be doing hd video editing on the rig so i will wait for some render tests etc...

i really don't know how a lowered scaled octo would compare to higher clocked quad...

sorry rambling now but i found the answer to my question.

best,

cl

[brokenjago]

When rendering video, the more cores the better. It pretty much scales linearly.